7 r > 6>. s y A ' / R S ) 

A Z Z S M e ^ 
ROMAN CATHOLICISM IN AMERICA. (\\\%oiQ 

THE CATHOLIC DEMOCRACY 
OF AMERICA. M 

BY J . E . C. B O D L E Y . 

I 

* BALTIMORE: 
J O H N M U R P H Y & C O . 

1 8 9 0 . 

i 





P R E F A C E . 

The accompanying Pamphlet is a reprint from two articles 
which have recently appeared, the former in the Nineteenth 
Century, the latter in the Edinburgh Review. 

Since Macaulay's splendid Essays of a half century ago, few 
contributions to current literature have excited so much interest, 
or elicited so much praise as have marked the appearance of these 
articles. They have been widely copied, and favorably com-
mented upon by the friends and foes of Catholicism in the English-
speaking world, and I learn that a French, and German transla-
tion of these papers has been published in Europe. 

By a masterly grasp of thought, Mr. Bodley has compressed 
into seventy-seven pages, the salient points of a century of ouf 
Church's history. He has given us a graphic and an interesting 
sketch of the rise and development and prosperity of the Catholic 
religion in the United States, together with the leading causes 
that have contributed to its marvellous extension. 

And this he has done in a style at once so attractive and enter-
taining, so luminous and perspicuous as to absorb the attention 
and delight the fancy of the reader from beginning to end. 

Should the Catholic reader meet with an expression here and 
there to which he would hesitate to subscribe, he should remember 
that the author is a Protestant; and indeed it is rarely that a 
production so free from bias, so broad and fair-minded has ever 
emanated from a non-Catholic pen. So warm indeed and sympa-
thetic is the tone of the articles that several critics were led to 
believe that the writer was of the household of the faith. 



iv Preface. 
I was reluctant for some time to yield to the request made to 

me to write this brief Preface, in view of the frequent and too 
partial allusions of Mr. Bodley to myself, which I would fain 
expunge from the pamphlet, had the distinguished author per-
mitted. But the importance of the subject which he as a stranger 
has dealt with, has constrained me to sacrifice personal feelings to 
the instruction and edification of the reading public. 

J A M E S C A R D I N A L G I B B O N S , 
Archbishop of Baltimore. 

B A L T I M O R E , August 20/A, 1890. 



ROMAN CATHOLICISM IN AMERICA. 

THE students of the Collegi Esteri at Eome are not in 
appearance an athletic race. They are a familiar feature of 
the Eternal City as they promenade somewhat listlessly its 
thoroughfares in groups of two and three, attired in the uni-
form of their various nationalities. The British tourist, as 
he suns himself on the Pincian Hill on a Sunday morning 
while his wife and daughters have gone to the English church 
at the Porta del Popolo, eyes askance what he calls their monk-
ish garb, and as he unfolds his Times to read the correspondence 
on I Compulsory Athletics' he devoutly thanks heaven that 
his young barbarians at Harrow and Oxford are not as these 
students. Even to the more sympathetic observer these pale 
seminarists do not give the impression of being in training 
for the life of endurance which the main body of the Church 
Militant imposes on its officers wherever stationed, whether in 
the slums of Westminster or in the fever-stricken camps of 
Tonkin or in the swamps of the Zambesi river. ' 

Such being the characteristic of these young ecclesiastics, the 
proceedings of a group of them surprised me not a little one 
sunny afternoon in the spring of 1887 on the flowery green 
sward of the Pamphilj Doria gardens. There, in an open space 
cleared among the ilex trees, a band of them, with cassocks 
turned up, were engaged in an active game. Its nimble mys-
teries were unfamiliar to English eyes, but the scientific manner 
in which a ball was thrown convinced me that the players were 
no foreigners. I t is an ethnological fact that the Anglo-Saxon 

3 



4 Romani Catholicism in America. 
race alone is capable of propelling a missile in the method 
known as "shying." The young Disraeli, who had nothing 
of the Anglo-Saxon in his wonderful nature, gives expression 
to this, when writing to his father from Malta how some 
British officers playing rackets had struck a ball to where he 
was sitting, and how he picked it up and requested " a rifleman 
to forward its passage, as I really had never thrown a ball in 
my life." There was no need, therefore, to accost the players 
m Italian or in French, so, to my question to one of them, 
" P r a y tell me who you are and what you are doing?" was 
made the answer in the unmistakable intonation of New Eng-
land, " We are the American College, Sir, and we are playing 
at base-ball." ,; 

This was my first acquaintance with the Catholic Church of 
the United States, and it was a typical instance of the intensely 
national idiosyncrasy of that great branch of the Church 
Universal that its students sent from the New World to be 
imbued with the tradition of the Old should have been playing 
their American base-ball beneath the very shadow of St. Peter's. 

On the shores of the western hemisphere nearest to Europe 
the first conspicuous landmark which from the Atlantic meets 
the traveller's eye are the lofty towers of a Catholic cathedral. 
Over Newfoundland, the outpost of the North American 
continent, the British flag flies, so that branch of the Catholic 
Church which set up the massive edifice crowning the heights 
above the Narrows of St. John's is not within the jurisdiction 
of the fathers, who are this month celebrating the centennial 
of their hierarchy at Baltimore, in the city that took its name 
from the first Governor of this colony, and thence, as we travel 
on the main land westward for 3,000 miles till the Pacific is 
reached, the ecclesiastical provinces into which the vast Domin-
ion of Canada is divided are in the same case. A passing 
glance, therefore, must suffice for these most interesting organi-
zations with their marked distinctive features. 

The Roman Catholic Church claims one-half of the popula-' 
tion of Newfoundland, and they to a man are of Irish extrac-



5 Romani Catholicism in America. 
tion. The French rivals of these much-enduring fisher-folk 
are also Catholics, but they are only summer itinerants on the 
French shore which they occupy under treaty right, and at the 
close of the codfishing season they retire to their islands of 
St. Pierre and Miquelon or even recross the Atlantic to Brit-
tany for the winter. Consequently there is not one French 
priest in the island. The clergy who work under that wise 
and amiable Irishman Bishop Power of St. John's and his 
colleagues have no sinecure. Excepting on the peninsula of 
Avalon, the interior of Newfoundland is uninhabited, and the 
clergy have to minister to a population scattered over a rock-
bound coast along which fogs and icebergs are a daily peril of 
their parochial voyages. These serfs of a harsh truck-system, 
though Ireland is there fatherland, are totally unlike the Irish 
immigrants, who are one of the largest elements of the popula-
tion throughout Greater Britain, such as are largely represented 
in Toronto and other dioceses of Upper Canada. 

On the way to French Canada a little settlement is passed 
near the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence which deserves 
a word of mention. The counties of Pictou and Antigonish 
on the north coast of Nova Scotia resemble the province of 
Quebec in the fact that a considerable proportion of their 
inhabitants can speak no English. French, however, is not 
their tongue but Gaelic, and among them are found a probably 
greater number of Gaelic-speaking Catholic Highlanders than 
in the whole of Scotland. 

The fair province which skirts the waters of the St. Lawrence 
was called by Frontenac and the founders of Quebec " La nou-
velle France," but Quebec has survived the old regime whose 
impress she bears, and now is the only bit of " L a vieille France" 
that the world c o n t a i n s - " La vieille France in its most refined, 
Catholic, and devout age," as Cardinal Manning once wrote to 
me. There are quiet towns in France such as Laon and Sois-
sons, which outwardly have an old-world look, but in the 
beautiful cathedrals of the old twin cities of l'Aisne the clergy 
and the Suisses are oftenest the only men who assist at High 



6 Romani Catholicism in America. 
Mass. At Quebec, the most nobly planted city of the western 
hemisphere, all is different. The Church is omnipresent. The 
view of the grey buildings seen from one's windows takes one 
back to the beginning of the last century, and the sight of a 
daily newspaper scarcely removes the illusion, for the little 
French journal under its " Faits divers " announces a miracle 
which took place last week in a neighboring village, and in an 
official column advertises the sentence of excommunication read 
on Sunday by the curé of St. Joseph at Lévis upon a luckless 
couple who have been defying Divine law and human con-
ventionality. 

Even the pastimes of the faithful are fashioned according to 
the ancien régime, or, at all events, certain modern forms of 
amusement are strictly banned. The Governor-General is in 
residence at his summer quarters, and the maidens of Quebec 
implore for a dispensation for a ball at the Citadel. All in 
vain : they are sternly referred to the official manual on Les 
danses et les bals, a grim little tract which commences with the 
severe proposition that " La danse et les bals, comme ils se font 
ordinairement, sont un scandale et un danger," and under the 
heading of "Les danses immodestes" they may read "sont 
réputées telles les danses modernes connues sous les noms de 
Yalse, Polka, Galop, Cancan et autres semblables." I t must 
not from this be imagined that the last named of these "danses 
vives " is a usual feature of the programmes of viceregal or 
other polite festivities in Canada, and why the good curé of 
N.D. de Quebec should have bracketed it with the other less 
volatile measures is a mystery. Perhaps the Highland reel 
was danced in Lord Lome's time, and was mistaken for 
it ; but this is only conjecture. At all events the maidens of 
Quebec refuse to be consoled with the historical fact that 
Madame de Maintenon never danced the polka. 

The Church in Lower Canada not only regulates the lives 
and occupations of the people, but it directs the politics of the 
province. That it represents no mere faction is shown by the 
attitude of the Federal Parliament at Ottawa whenever the 



7 Romani Catholicism in America. 
Provincial Assembly legislates on the Church's behalf. The 
Jesuits' Estates Bill gives 400,000 dollars out of the treasury 
to the Church in compensation for the property of the society 
which escheated to the government subsequent to the suppression 
of the Order by Clement X I V . The powerful Orange lodges 
of Ontario have set the country ablaze with an agitation this 
year, which has swept out of sight commercial union, the 
fisheries, and every other Canadian question, urging the Domin-
ion Parliament to recommend the veto of the bill. But Sir 
John Macdonald, our Canadian Premier, himself an Orange-
man, is the astutest statesman on the American continent, and 
he knows that in French Canada the Church and the people 
are one and indivisible. Hence in the Parliament at Ottawa, 
with its Protestant majority in a house of over 200 members, 
only thirteen could be found to vote for the disallowance of 
the bill. 

Amid the bitter strife of creeds the Cardinal Archbishop 
of Quebec maintains the respect and confidence of the Protes-
tant minority of the province (which includes most of the 
wealthy and educated of the border city of Montreal), so much 
so that it has been seriously suggested in Protestant quarters 
that for the protection of the minority it would be advan-
tageous if representative institutions in Quebec were abolished, 
and the government of the province invested in Cardinal 
Taschereau. The Jesuits have great influence in Lower 
Canada, and they are not universally beloved among their co-
religionists, but the hold which both the person and the office of 
the Archbishop of Quebec has upon the affection and imagi-
nation of the populace is daily made manifest. The scene on 
the day of the installation of the Cardinal after his return 
from Rome, whither he had been summoned to receive the 
scarlet hat, was most memorable, when, amid the roar of 
artillery and the clang of bells, he gave from the balcony of 
the Basilica the benediction to the kneeling multitude. 

Cardinal Taschereau is not a man of the people, as are some 
of his most capable suffragans and colleagues. Monseigneur 



8 Romani Catholicism in America. 
Duhamel, the able and refined Archbishop of Ottawa, is a fine 
example of the best type of habitant, a Canadian in everything, 
even to the pronunciation of his native language. The Cardinal, 
on the other hand, is a courtly French prelate of the last century. 
A visit at the old palace is a ceremony of some solemnity. The 
Vicar-General Père Legaré with graceful urbanity welcomes 
the visitor in a sumptuous chamber hung with the portraits of 
the occupants of the see of Quebec for more than two hundred 
years, beginning with Laval and St. Vallier, till the Cardinal 
enters, in his robes of scarlet and violet. For an hour the 
dignified old man discourses in the stately French of the last 
century, which seems alive again. At one moment his talk is 
of the decadence of the times, the perniciousness of modern 
literature, but it sounds as if a prelate of old France were 
deprecating the growing license of the more recent works of 
the author of the Henriade or lamenting that Crébillon's dramas 
were supplanting the masterpieces of Racine. The only inhar-
monious note is the modern costume of the Cardinal's visitor : 
for. the rest the scene is such as is sometimes portrayed on the 
walls of the Salon—it is Une audience chez son Éminence sous 
Louis Quinze. 

I have lingered too long in the fascinating region of Quebec, 
but Cardinal Taschereau will be referred to again in connection 
with Cardinal Gibbons, so it is as well to give some slight 
impression of the head of the mother Church of America and 
of his surroundings. 

The Church in Ontario has been mentioned, so, hastening 
westward, we will not pause until the great lakes are passed 
and Winnipeg is reached. A few years hence Manitoba may be 
as populous as Illinois, but at present the work of the Church 
is chiefly missionary in its character. Archbishop Taché's 
suffragans are Frenchmen, not French Canadians, and there is 
a vast dissimilarity between the domestic habitants of Quebec 
and the half-breed Métis of the Northwest, who are by degrees 
giving way to immigrant settlers from every nation of Europe". 
Still further westward we go to the Foothills of the Rockies, 



9 Romani Catholicism in America. 
where the venerable Père Lacombe is ending his days among 
the Indians who call him father. The prairies are left behind 
and the fastnesses of the mountains are entered. The Canadian 
Pacific cars thunder through the passes twice a day, but ten 
years ago they had been trodden by the feet of no white men, 
with one exception. As the train winds through the magnifi-
cent valley of the Fraser, here and there on mountain tops 
may be seen, black against the sky, a rude cross which marks 
an Indian burying-ground, consecrated in these solitudes by 
the missionaries of Rome. 

The passage over English territory from Atlantic to Pacific 
is highly interesting as displaying the varied capabilities and 
characteristics of the two greatest organizations the world has 
ever seen—the British Empire and the Church of Rome. At 
each stage of the journey the Church Universal is seen justi-
fying its title of Catholicity by its adaptability to the nature 
and the needs of each varying community. The Dominion of 
Canada federated under the British flag, presents within its 
limits differences almost as marked as those which distinguish 
from one another the States of Europe. The Church of Rome 
observes precisely the same ritual, framed in identical language, 
for a little band of Blackfeet Indians kneeling in a log-hut in 
the far west, as it uses for a French congregation in the Basilica 
at Quebec or for the Irish immigrants who worship in Toronto 
Cathedral ; but the Church in Lower Canada differs in mode 
of thought and manners of its members as widely from the 
Church in Ontario as do the Catholic Catalonians of Barcelona 
from the Catholic Flemings of Antwerp. "Within a few hours' 
journey from Vancouver in the west and from Montreal in the 
east a frontier is crossed beyond which an entirely different 
state of things is found. The American nation, though sprung 
from sources more heterogeneous than those of the inhabitants 
of the Dominion, are completely homogeneous in language, 
in sentiment, and in economy of life. The New York mil-
lionaire, the Texan ranche-man, the farmer of Vermont, or 
the planter of Louisiana is above all things a citizen of the 



10 Romani Catholicism in America. 
United States whether his ancestors were British or Batavian, 
Teutonic or Scandinavian, whether his religion be Papist or 
Presbyterian, Episcopalian or Methodist, and the members of 
the Roman Catholic Church throughout the Union are stamped 
with unmistakable national characteristics as were the base-
ball-playing seminarists in the Pamphilj Doria gardens. 

Almost fifty years have passed since Macaulay wrote: 
" There is not and there never was on earth a work of human 
policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic 
Church." In the interval, the Holy See has lost its sovereignty 
over a strip of Italian territory: the troops of the Empire 
which was the bastard offspring of the French Revolution no 
longer garrison the Castle of St. Angelo, but the Church, if 
it has lost the temporal sway of a province, has gained spiritual 
dominion all over the face of the earth, and that by the indirect 
agency of the chief Protestant race of the world. 

That the Anglo-Saxon is the most vigorous race which the 
world has ever seen is shown by the ease with which it is 
imposing the English language on all peoples with which it 
intermingles—not by conquest, as in the case of some of the 
Roman colonies, not by penal coercion, as in that of the French 
Huguenots at the Cape, whose language was stamped out 
by the Boers, but simply by contact. The American nation 
affords the great exemplification of this process. In the British 
Empire it is being carried out, though less conspicuously, but 
in the United States, where probably less than one-half of 
the inhabitants are of purely British descent, it is so complete 
that the grandchildren of Germans who spoke no word of 
English will talk to an Englishman of the Elizabethan litera-
ture as " our common inheritance." I t may be urged that the 
Irish Catholics have done as much as the Anglo-Saxons in 
making English the lingua franca of half the world's surface. 
This is in a sense true, but the Irish are not, strictly speaking, 
a colonizing race. The Irish like the Germans, are splendid 
settlers, and Greater Britain would have been a comparatively 
small domain without their prolific aid; but since the days 



11 Romani Catholicism in America. 
when Spain and Portugal made South America a Catholic 
continent, the Anglo-Saxon race alone has founded colonies 
successfully. The Catholic countries of Europe have ceased 
to colonize, but the Church of Rome has not suffered thereby. 
Such is her marvellous vitality and energy that' in these last 
fifty years she has made progress in English-speaking countries, 
which perhaps in the end will be of greater moment than all 
her previous achievements, establishing herself in the newest 
colonies founded by Protestant England, and extending her 
sway within that part of the North American continent which 
two centuries earlier was colonized by Protestant Englishmen. 

Mr. Gladstone has been taken to task, it is difficult to see 
why, for his recent prediction in Paris, that a century hence 
the American nation will be " the great organ of the powerful 
British tongue." We are all hopeful for the future of the 
British Empire, but the future of the British Empire is 
fraught with anxious uncertainty, whereas the pathway of the 
American Republic is unobstructed and clear, and it seems to 
be humanly certain that in less than a hundred years' time it 
will be the most populous civilized nation of the world, and 
the greatest in material jJrosperity. Its difficulties ahead, 
which are remarked by its men of foresight and by outside 
critics, are not such as are likely to interfere with either of 
those consummations. Mr. Gladstone's estimate of the popu-
lation of the United States a century hence was 600,000,000. 
Although we are familiar with similar prodigious figures in 
reference to the teeming hordes of the Chinese Empire, it is 
almost impossible to grasp the idea of myriads in connection 
with Western civilization, still less of such numbers being 
gathered together in one nation, speaking our own English 
language. If the greatness of nations is to be gauged merely 
by population and commercial prosperity, there can be no 
doubt that America is fated to take the foremost place among 
nations, but it will only be set up in that high place when 
the peoples of the Old World, with their literature and 
historic traditions, shall have abdicated their position by 



12 Romani Catholicism in America. 
consenting to the doctrine that numbers and material wealth 
alone constitute the greatness of a State. 

I n the relations of the Roman Catholic Church to the 
American nation we have, then, one of the most interesting 
phenomena it is possible to conceive—the contact of the most 
venerable and powerful organization of the old order with 
the most advanced and prosperous community of the new. 
In all the varied history of the Church of Rome she has 
never had the experience which in the United States she has 
encountered during the hundred years since the establishment 
of the American hierarchy. In the Old World the old civili-
zation has grown up side by side with her, and there is no 
page of the history of Europe which is not marked with the 
Fisher's seal. Nor has her activity been confined to the civil-
ized places of the earth. On virgin soil she has worked with 
self-denying enterprise in every quarter of the globe, and the 
early history of the remoter parts of the great American conti-
nent is the record of the Jesuit fathers and the other mission-
ary pioneers of Rome. But in the United States the Church 
finds itself in the midst of a new civilization, of the highest 
type as regards the diffusion of education and material com-
fort through all classes, though imperfect by reason of the 
nation never having passed through the discipline of youth 
to its precocious manhood, since in America there has been 
no slow development from barbarism through medievalism 
to a ripe civilization. The Church which in the Old World has 
assisted at the birth and death of empires and principalities— 
crowning kings, upsetting dynasties, and hastening revolu-
tions—here in the New World, amid a transplanted society, 
knows nothing of treaties and frontiers, nothing of wars of 
succession and State intrigue. I t is in America that she 
seems to have the greatest opportunity of realizing the admo-
nition of her Founder, "Regnum meum non est de hoc 
mundo." 

Americans of culture frequently lament that theirs is not 
a land of lofty ideals. Perhaps no nation—as a nation—has 



13 Romani Catholicism in America. 
a high ideal; but in England and France and Germany 
(though this is no golden age of literature) we have teachers 
who take us out of the traffic of the market-place. In Amer-
ica, unfortunately, literature seems almost to have come to an 
end. The brilliant band of New Englanders, most of whom 
came out from Harvard College, has nearly disappeared, and 
few successors are forthcoming. The blight which has fallen 
on American authorship seems like a nemesis for the iniqui-
tous copyright laws, which are a remarkable expression of 
the lack of moral sense of the nation. The Church of Rome 
has a new experience in exerting her influence among this too 
shrewd, too practical, too prosperous people, the most charac-
teristic offspring of the nineteenth century. Men may disap-
prove the methods of the Catholic Church and discredit her 
beliefs, but few will deny that her ideal is the most perfect 
ever set before the human race. 

The American nation, again, is lacking in tradition. The 
soil of the United States—or, at all events, a portion of it— 
has an independent history of a hundred years, but the mass 
of the people only inherit it by adoption. American art 
seems to have exhausted itsfelf in pictorial representations of 
Generals Burgoyne and Lord Cornwallis in humiliating sit-
uations ; but few of the ancestors either of the painters of 
historical pictures or of the patriots who deliver Fourth of 
July orations bled in the Revolutionary War on the side of 
the colonists. When the capitulations at Saratoga and York-
town took place, they were passing their boyhood as com-
patriots of Robert Emmet, and hearing how Lord Edward 
Fitzgerald had been wounded by the American rebels at 
Eutaw Springs, or were watching the last days of their mon-
arch, Frederick the Great, and growing up to be the foes of 
the French allies of young America. 

These are some of the attributes which the Church of Rome 
has to bestow upon the American nation. In return, that 
great people is investing the Church with an endowment of 
greater magnitude than the most hopeful enthusiast for the 



14 Romani Catholicism in America. 
spread of the Roman Catholic religion ever dreamed of, and 
one which is likely to revolutionize Christendom. Of all 
the languages of Europe which have influenced civilization, 
English, for historical causes, has been spoken by fewer 
Roman Catholics than any other tongue. English-speaking 
Catholics have been a comparatively small body, the major-
ity of whom, as recently as half a century ago, were persons 
actually born in Ireland. The growth of the American 
nation, as the largest organ of the English language, is com-
pletely changing the position of our tongue among the millions 
who follow the faith of Rome. The expansion of England in 
her colonies is assisting towards this remarkable issue, but the 
United States is the chief instrument in bringing about the 
result, which men of this generation will live to see, of the 
Church of Rome having a greater number of its active mem-
bers speaking English than any other living language. 

As it is impossible to treat of one of the great influences 
which regulate the conduct of a nation without expressing 
some opinion upon the people, I should like, though perhaps 
needlessly, to disclaim any spirit of censoriousness in my 
necessarily imperfect observations» Americans are said to be 
hyper-sensitive with regard to English criticism, and small 
wonder if they are so, considering the de haut en bas tone 
assumed by many of our countrymen when speaking or writ-
ing about American institutions. I t is true that there is a 
small section of American society which, by its singular 
admiration for, and imitation of, what is least laudable in 
English manners and customs, lays itself out as the object of 
British patronizing airs, but the unworthier forms of Anglo-
mania do not count for much in a population of sixty millions. 
There are no people on the face of the earth who are more 
willing than are Americans to discuss with outsiders their own 
foibles and to listen with generous endurance to strictures 
upon them, provided their critics approach the subject as 
amateurs of human nature, and not with that air of superi-
ority which may be the secret of England's greatness, but 



15 Romani Catholicism in America. 
which also is the secret of our being the best-hated nation in 
the world. 

My impression is that Americans are much less tolerant of 
criticism from their countrymen than from strangers. Bishop 
Potter's sermon on the hundredth anniversary of Washing-
ton's inauguration, which came like a warning peal of thun-
der amid the crackle of the centennial fireworks, was received 
as a thunderstorm would be by a holiday crowd assembled for 
a pyrotechnic exhibition. Mr. Henry James, it is said, would, 
if recognized at Schenectady, receive at the hands of the sur-
vivors of the family of Mr. Ezra B. Miller a reception similar 
to that experienced at Tarascon by a luckless commis voyageur, 
who registered his name at the " Empereurs " as A. Daudet, 
and was chivied to the station and almost into the Rhone by 
the outraged comrades of the immortal. Tartarin. Mr. Mat-
thew Arnold — " W e still had Thyrsis then" — gave less 
offence by his own comments on things American that he 
caused by quoting from Emerson, at the conclusion of his 
lecture at Boston on the philosopher of Concord, the presum-
ably well-known sentence, " great, intelligent, sensual, avari-
cious America;" but it was whispered that the culture of 
Massachusetts, which is said to be in the habit of murmuring 
snatches of Emerson in its sleep, actually did not recognize 
the passage as an excerpt from their master. 

In the early spring of 1887, when the students of the 
American College were playing their national game in sight 
of the Vatican, grave events were taking place within its 
walls, in the interest of the Catholic Church in the United 
States. Cardinal Gibbons was in Rome. In the June of the 
previous year he had been created cardinal, and his presence, 
for the purpose of being invested with his title and the red 
berretta, was causing the liveliest curiosity among the Ameri-
can tourists wintering in the Holy City. There was a lady 
from Chicago (Chicago people declared that she came from 
St. Louis) whose gratification at having seen the new Cardinal 
knew no bounds. " He is one of the most intelligent of our 



16 Romani Catholicism in America. 
citizens," she remarked, | and is the author of the best book 
about Rome, anyway, and I am going right away to the store 
in the Piazza di Spagna, to see if they have gotten a Tauch-
nitz copy of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." 

To stimulate the taste for bibliography of his western com-
patriots was not, however, even the ulterior object of Cardinal 
Gibbons's visit to Rome. On the 7th of June, 1886, two scarlet 
hats were assigned to North America, the head of the Cana-
dian hierarchy being called to the Sacred College on the same 
day as the Primate of the United States. Some months later 
an event unprecedented in the history of Christendom took 
place when two princes of the Church crossed the Atlantic 
Ocean in one vessel. The voyage together of the two cardi-
nals on the French packet from New York to Havre was a 
most dramatic situation, inasmuch as one of them was about 
to make his official visit to Rome the occasion for moving 
the Congregation of the Holy Office to rescind a decree which 
it had pronounced at the instance of the other. The archié-
piscopal travelling companions surely never found themselves 
in such a remarkable position : regarding one another with 
sentiments of affectionate respect, equal in their loyalty to the 
Church, and of equal authority in her councils, summoned to 
Rome to receive the highest reward in her gift (save the triple 
tiara), these powerful chiefs of neighboring hierarchies were 
about to approach the Holy Office with petitions of irrecon-
cilable tenor. The Archbishop of Quebec's mission was an 
easier one than that of the Archbishop of Baltimore. Cardi-
nal Taschereau had only to advise the Supreme Congregation 
to follow out tradition by adhering to a delivered judgment. 
Cardinal Gibbons had undertaken the prodigious task of mov-
ing the Holy See to go back upon its own decision. 

A month before the two Archbishops were created Cardi-
nals, there was read in all the churches of Lower Canada the 
following ' mandement,' issued by Monseigneur Taschereau :— 

Having learned that the delegates of a society known as the Knights of 
Labor have tried to recruit members in parts of this province, we deem 
it our duty, brethren, to put you on your guard against it, and mark, we do 



17 Romani Catholicism in America. 
not speak in our own name, but in that of the Holy See, whose advice we 
have sought. In October 1885 we sent to Borne an authentic copy of the 
rules and constitutions of that society. The Congregation of the Holy 
Office, having examined them with all due precaution, sent us this answer, 
which should be for you an absolute rule of conduct, and keep you away 
from the Society of the Knights of Labor:—" On account of the principles, 
organization and statutes of the Knights of Labor, that association is to be 
relegated among those which are prohibited by the Holy See." 

Archbishop Gibbons at once grasped the importance of this 
proceeding. He summoned to Baltimore a Commission of 
the Archbishops of the United States, which decided by ten 
voices to two that neither justice nor prudence demanded the 
condemnation of the Knights of Labor, and sixty out of the 
remaining sixty-three bishops expressed the same opinion. 
The two Archbishops who voted for condemnation are prelates 
of exemplary piety, but neither of them can be considered to 
be in touch with the modern movement. One of them, the 
venerable Archbishop of St. Louis, was consecrated to that 
see half a century ago, when the Missouri was the boundary 
of the far west, remote from civilization. The other, the 
Spanish Archbishop of Santa F6, has for his diocese the wild 
territory of New Mexico, which supports only thirty-six secular 
priests, nearly all of whom are Spaniards or Mexicans. 

In February 1887, after Cardinal Gribbons's arrival in Rome 
he presented to Cardinal Simeoni, the Prefect of the Propa-
ganda, a memorandum which is one of the most statesmanlike 
documents ever penned by an American, and which takes a 
much wider scope of the questions involved than the mere 
consideration of the legality of any given organization. A 
few quotations translated from this lengthy memorial must 
suffice. The Cardinal, with thoroughly American sentiment, 
remarks that an organization the head of which has been called 
into conference by the President of the United States cannot 
be deemed hostile to authority. He then declares that the 
power of monopolies in America has made organized opposition 
necessary, and that " it is not only the right of the workingmen 
to protect themselves, but it is the obligation of the entire 

, 2 



18 Romani Catholicism in America. 
people to assist them in finding a remedy for the dangers with 
which civilization and social order are menaced by avarice, 
oppression, and corruption." Association, he says, is " in har-
mony with the| genius of our country," and he discards as 
" neither possible nor necessary in our country" the idea of 
fraternities under the supervision of priests taking the place of 
purely industrial organizations wherein Catholics and Protes-
tants meet on a common footing, which intermingling consti-
tutes no danger to religion; " the only grave danger would 
arise from the alienation of her children from the Church, 
which nothing would occasion more certainly than imprudent 
condemnation." After some remarks on the ethics of strikes 
and the uselessness of hoping that violence can always be 
avoided in them, the Cardinal proceeds:— 

It is the part of Christian prudence to convert into a legitimate, peaceful, 
and beneficial competition that which a course of repellent severity would 
turn into a latent volcano such as society fears and the Church deplores in 
Europe. On this point I strongly insist because my intimate acquaintance 
with the social condition of our country profoundly convinces me that we 
are face to face with a question which not only concerns the rights of the 
working classes, who ought to be specially dear to the Church sent by our 
Divine Master to preach the gospel to the poor, but one which involves the 
most fundamental interests of the Church and of human society in the future. 
Every one who ponders well the ways along which Divine Providence is 
guiding contemporary history must recognize the important part which the 
power of the people is playing and will play. . . . Hitherto our country 
has presented the picture of true democracy seeking the general prosperity 
by means of sound principles and social order. To preserve this admirable 
state of things it is absolutely necessary for religion to remain in possession 
of the affections of the multitude. As Cardinal Manning has well said, 
" In the future era the Church will have to deal not with Princes and Parlia-
ments but with the masses." . . . Of all the glorious titles earned by the 
Church there is none which gives it greater influence than that of Friend 
of the People. Surely in our democratic nation this is the title which is 
winning for the Catholic Church not only the enthusiastic devotion of mil-
lions of her children, but the respect and admiration of all our citizens 
whatever their religious belief. . . . As the great questions of the future 
will not be those of war, of commerce, or of finance, but social questions 
which relate to the bettering of the condition of the masses, it is of sovereign 
importance for the Church to be found invariably and firmly ranged on the 
side of humanity. 



19 Romani Catholicism in America. 
The memorial concludes with an eloquent recapitulation of 

the dangers the Church will incur if she adheres to " the easy 
course " of condemning this labor organization, not the least 
being " the accusation of being ' unamerican,' that is to say, 
foreign to our national sentiment.—the most powerful arm the 
enemies of the Church can direct against her." The Holy 
See will be regarded not as a paternal power but as an unjust 
and tyrannical authority, while the social agitation will last 
as long as there are ills to remedy. The forms of organization 
are necessarily only temporary. To strike at one of them 
would be to embark upon a war without system and without 
end. The American people regard with calm the progress 
of the social struggle, and " to speak out with the frankness 
imposed on me by my office, both prudence suggests and the 
dignity of the Church demands that we should not offer to 
America an ecclesiastical protection which she neither asks for 
nor thinks she has need of." As is well known, the result 
was that Cardinal Gibbons induced the Holy See to take the 
unprecedented course» of revoking a sentence which had been 
recorded on the representation of the Primate of another 
hierarchy, a re-decision which appears the more remarkable 
the more the Cardinal's arguments are weighed, revealing as 
they do an opportunism of a type more advanced and enlight-
ened than the Church has had the credit of sympathizing with. 

Near the old manor-house where once lived Charles Carroll, 
the last survivor of the signers of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence and the kinsman of John Carroll, the first Catholic 
bishop in the United States, among the verdant woods and 
pastures of Maryland stands a college directed by a staff of 
Sulpician fathers. During one of my visits to Baltimore, one 
of these good French priests, a Rémois by birth, delighted to 
see a traveller who was familiar with the vine-clad hills of 
the Marne, confided to me the contrast he had experienced 
between the solemn ceremony attending an audience at the 
Archbishop's Palace at Reims and the kindly welcome the 



20 Romani Catholicism in America. 
humblest priest was certain of receiving from the great Ameri-
can Cardinal at his " Residence." The old-fashioned unpre-
tentious house, where a good deal of the world's history is being 
moulded, would be scorned by one of those sleek preachers of 
the gospel of sleekness who fatly flourish in certain American 
cities. For all that, Charles Street, Baltimore, has a dignity 
which Fifth Avenue will never attain to. Beacon Street, over-
looking Boston Common, is in the springtime more beautiful, 
but there is an air of distinction not found in any other 
thoroughfare in the United States in the street which takes its 
name from the royal husband of Henrietta Maria, in whose 
honor Maryland was named. Baltimore itself was called after 
an English title which became extinct years before two-thirds 
of our present peerage existed, and its old world associations 
are not inappropriate for the headquarters in the new world 
of the Church which is here initiating a work undreamed of 
by Cecil Calvert, or the daughter of Marie de' Medici, if the 
future of their faith ever exercised the minds of those seven-
teenth-century Catholics. 

A walk with the Cardinal through the tranquil streets of 
the residential quarter of Baltimore gives a vivid impression 
of the affection with which the Monumental City regards its 
distinguished son who was baptized and ordained in the 
Cathedral over which he now presides. Though Maryland 
is a Roman Catholic stronghold there is a vast Protestant 
population in its great commercial capital, yet, as the Cardinal 
passes along, nearly every hat is doffed to the simple citizen 
who has made a greater impression on European policy than 
any American of his generation. One day last spring we 
found ourselves in the midst of a congregation streaming out 
of a church, the architecture of which the Cardinal drew my 
attention to, while he responded to the salutations of the 
crowd. I naturally concluded that they were his own people, 
but no, he explained, "they are our Episcopalian friends." 
The determined prelate who was strong enough to lead the 
Vatican to reverse its own decision has nothing of narrow 



21 Romani Catholicism in America. 
arrogance in his gentle nature, which loves to live in charity 
with all men. In his popular exposition of Catholic doctrine, 
§ Faith of our Fathers," of which nearly two hundred thousand 
copies have been sold in thirteen years, though it is a contro-
versial work, the Protestant sects are nowhere offensively 
referred to as heretics or schismatics, but as " my dissenting 
brethren." 

The delicate youthfulness of the Cardinal's countenance 
makes it difficult to realize that he was a Bishop twenty-one 
years ago. A year later, when he was only thirty-five, he 
attended the (Ecumenical Council and was one of the minority 
which voted against the promulgation of the Definition of 
Infallibility. I have heard him quote the impressive perora-
tion of Cardinal Simor, the Primate of Hungary, in his speech 
opposing its adoption, " Hannibalis exercitus ad portas Rom® 
stat; equorum strepitum audio," prophetic words which were 
uttered a few months before the troops not of a foreign invader 
but of Victor Emmanuel were at the Porta Pia. 

On the question of Church and State the Cardinal holds 
the view practically universal among Americans of all creeds, 
that the Church should be absolutely free from State control, 
and entirely dependent on voluntary support. He relates 
how, during the Second Empire, he once, on his way from 
Rome, visited the Bishop of Annecy in Savoy. " I was struck 
with the splendor of his palace, and saw a sentinel at the door, 
placed there by the French Government as a guard of honor. 
But the venerable Bishop soon disabused me of my favorable 
impressions. He told me he was in a state of gilded slavery; 
' I cannot,' said he, ' build a sacristy without the permission 
of the government.' I never wish to see the day when the 
Church will invoke or receive government aid to build our 
churches or to pay our clergy : in proportion as State patron-
age would increase, the sympathy and aid of the faithful 
would diminish." 

The biographer of Father Da mi en, with all his sympathy 
for the Church of Rome, gives, as one reason for his dissent 



22 Romani Catholicism in America. 
from lier communion, that she discourages the reading of the 
Bible by the laity, an impression shared by most Englishmen 
who passed their childhood twenty years ago or more. Mr. 
Clifford ought to have heard with me a sermon preached last 
March, of the tenor of which the following extract from the 
Baltimore Sun will give some idea:— 

Cardinal Gibbons preached at the Cathedral yesterday morning the first 
of the sermons he is going to deliver on Sundays in Lent. His subject was 
" Reading the Bible," to which he strongly urged his hearers to give some 
minutes at least every day. After instancing St. Augustine's and other 
conspicuous conversions, which resulted from hearing passages in the Word 
of God spoken, he proceeded: "St. Charles Borromeo says. 'The Bible 
ought to be the garden of the priest.' I say it ought to be the garden of 
the laity, too. What is good for us is good for you. God forbid we should 
go to heaven alone. We should be lonely there without you, shepherds 
without their flocks. We ought not to have a monopoly of religion, holiness, 
and goodness," &c. &c. 

There was one expression in this sermon which struck me, 
as the Cardinal made use of it more than once, the words, 
" spiritual profession " in contexts where " priestly office " was 
the almost obvious phrase and would certainly have been 
chosen by a Ritualistic curate, as in the sentence, " In season 
and out of season I am by the apostle bidden to exhort you 
by virtue of my spiritual profession." His life and teaching 
are a protest against sacerdotal pretension. On the morning 
of my last interview with the Cardinal, he had just returned 
from an Ordination, and he said to me, " I have been warning 
my young priests not to think that the putting on of a cassock 
means the putting off of one's humanity," just as in " Faith of 
our Fathers " he had written, " Should a priest consider him-
self greater than other men because he exercises such authority? 
Far from i t ; he ought to humble himself beneath others when 
he reflects to what weak hands are assigned such tremendous 
powers." 

As the Cardinal has declared to the laity in the name of the 
priesthood that " I t is our earnest wish that every word of the 
Gospel may be imprinted on your memory and on your heart," 



23 Romani Catholicism in America. 
it would be a magnificent memorial of the Centenary of the 
American Hierarchy if the assembled Bishops would move 
the Holy See to permit them to supervise an American edition 
of the Bible to supersede the Douay translation. The English 
Authorized Version has become such an integral portion of 
English literature that the most powerful Church is handi-
capped among English-speaking people in not using its phrase-
ology. There are a score or two of passages which would 
need emendation for doctrinal reasons, but the rest of the 
Anglica versio the Roman Catholic Church might appropriate 
with great advantage to herself without the surrender of a 
shred of doctrine. There are hundreds of verses of Holy 
Scripture and hundreds of Biblical names, which in our author-
ized form have passed into the everyday language and litera-
ture of the people—perhaps to a greater extent in America 
even than in England: most of the classical passages have 
precisely identical meanings in their equivalents in the Douay 
Bible, but in that version they are as uncouth and unfamiliar 
as are proper names like Achab, Assuerus, Aman, and Mar-
dochai. The Catholic Church in America has adopted one 
detestable institution from the Protestant churches in England 
—the pew system, which is as inappropiate in a democratic 
country as it is inconsistent with the principle of the great 
Church of the people. Why not restore that Protestant 
institution to the sole use and enjoyment of American Protes-
tants (for the English Church is discarding it), and take in 
exchange the noblest translation ever made in the days before 
translation was a lost art, which is in truth the common heri-
tage of all English-speaking people? 

An able writer, quoting Bishop Vaughan of Salford, has 
recently remarked upon the debt which the Church of Rome 
owes to the Irish, in whose brogue her services are recited all 
over the world. Undoubtedly the immigrant Irish have done 
a great propagandist work, but no graver mistake could be 
made than that of supposing that the Catholic Church in 
America is merely a branch of the Church in Ireland. Much 



24 Romani Catholicism in America. 
misapprehension as to things American is caused by travellers 
forming their judgments from what they see in New York, 
which is emphatically not a microcosm of the United States 
for the reason that in no other city does the immigrant popula-
tion remain unassimilated so long. Visitors sometimes leave 
New York with the idea that the Catholic Church in America 
is represented by Tammany Hall, on account of the promi-
nence of that institution; but if they went down town to the 
neighborhood of the Church of St. Antony of Padua, they 
might equally well imagine that the Church in America is 
exclusively Italian, and in another quarter they would find 
German priests serving German congregations. The unceas-
ing flow of immigration makes New York the least American 
city of the United States; but throughout the Union the 
grandchildren of men born in Westmeath or in Westphalia 
are as thoroughly American as are the descendants of the ladies 
who " refused George Washington," who, from the number of 
their progeny, must have been more numerous than St. 
Ursula's virgins at Cologne. Of course, the Irish accent is 
heard at many a Catholic altar between Boston and Santa 
Barbara. The first church I entered in the United States 
was the Cathedral at San Francisco, where the preacher was 
a fair-haired young priest, with the face of an angel and a 
brogue which carried one from the Golden Gate to the Cove of 
Cork; but the vicar-general of the diocese, who is a member 
of the old Irish family of Prendergast, is as polished an 
American gentleman as is Archbishop Corrigan of New York, 
or Archbishop Ryan of Philadelphia, both of whom bear 
Irish names, and neither of whom has any more brogue than 
has President Harrison who is descended from the Puritan 
regicide. 

Nor must it be imagined^ that the Catholics of America 
are in great preponderance Irish, even by descent. Opening 
at random the clergy list of the United States, I find at 
the commencement of the letter B the following names: 
Baak, Baart, Baasen, Babinski, Bachand, Bachmann, Backes, 



25 Romani Catholicism in America. 
Badelon, Badilla, Baeumle, Baker—half the nationalities of 
Europe represented; Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, German, 
French, Polish, Hungarian, and English, but no Irish name. 
Of course, if the book had opened at letter O, we might have 
lighted on a very Irish column, interspersed with a few excep-
tions, like Oechtering, Oeinck, Offergeld, and Ogulin. The 
list is instructive as showing the cosmopolitan character both 
of the American nation and of the Catholic Church. The 
enumeration of the occupants of the see of New Orleans 
exemplifies this. French bishops might be looked for in the 
Creole episcopates of Louisiana, but the present Archbishop 
of New Orleans is a Dutchman, and his predecessors this 
century have included Spaniards and a Belgian, as well as 
Frenchmen. 

I t should be noted, however, that the nationality of a priest 
in the United States does not necessarily afford information 
as to the origin of his congregation, whether he be Irish, 
German, or of some less numerous race of settlers. The pro-
portion of foreign priests to the Catholic laity is large, on 
account of the obvious difficulty in obtaining sufficient candi-
dates for a profession which does not offer great pecuniary 
rewards in a country where material prosperity is the chief 
aim of life. Two hundred young seminarists singing Tenebras 
in the choir of Baltimore Cathedral for this reason struck 
me as a most interesting spectacle to witness in America. 
The son of a peasant or of a humble tradesman in Connaught 
or in Flanders, by taking holy orders, secures high social 
promotion, and his modest clerical stipend is usually a large 
advance on the income he would have touched had he fol-
lowed his father's calling. In the United States there is no 
peasantry, and the young postulants for the priesthood recruited 
from all ranks of life are each giving up the chance of acquir-
ing wealth, which is the birthright of every United States 
citizen. All honor is due to that small section of the man-
hood of America, whether found among theological students 
or among professors and teachers at Harvard, Yale and Johns 



26 Reman Catholicism in America. 
Hopkins, which voluntarily abnegates a career held in the 
highest honor, because opulence is its goal, and dedicates 
itself to a life of relative poverty, for the sake of religion or 
of sound learning. 

Philadelphia, unlike New York, is a typical American 
commercial city which illustrates the position and progress of 
the Roman Catholic Church in the Union. Although the 
estimable Society of Friends is not as relatively strong there 
as formerly, and though Pennsylvania was in the old days a 
favorable locality for Catholic settlers, yet the tradition of 
Philadelphia is decidedly Protestant. For all that, the 
"Quaker City" contains nearly as many Roman Catholics as 
the entire population of Rome. I t contains more Catholics 
than the entire population of any other town in Catholic 
Italy but Naples; of any town in Catholic Spain but Madrid; 
of any town in Catholic Belgium but Brussels; and of any 
town in France except Paris and Lyons. Among the great 
Catholic cities of Europe whose inhabitants are less numerous 
than the Catholic population of Philadelphia are Milan, 
Turin, Palermo, Barcelona, Antwerp, Bordeaux and Mar-
seilles. Statements in this form are frequently made to 
illustrate the. vastness of London, but Philadelphia is not 
even a London on a small scale. It is a characteristic Amer-
ican city of the first rank, larger than any single British 
municipality in the provinces, but not much larger than 
Manchester and Salford together with the adjoining town-
ships, and it contains over 300,000 Catholics. The next 
census will probably show that this figure is considerably 
below the mark, as the diocese contains 400,000 Catholics, 
and there is no great centre of population within it outside 
Philadelphia. 

We find that the Roman, Catholic Church can claim 10,-
000,000 United States citizens in a population of 60,000,000, 
it is difficult to over-estimate the influence which the expan-
sion of the Church in America will have on the future 
of Christendom. Judging from her past progress and con-



27 Romani Catholicism in America. 
sidering that the two races to which the majority of Amer-
ican Catholics belong are the two most prolific of the white 
races in the United States, it seems certain that she will 
increase her proportion with the growth of the population. 
But, calculating as if she will remain relatively stationary 
and reducing by one-third the estimated 600,000,000 which 
it is predicted that the United States will contain in a hun-
dred years' time, the Roman Catholic Church will then claim 
nearly 70,000,000 English-speaking people in America alone. 
By that time Australasia, South Africa and Canada will be 
thickly inhabited. Under what flag those vast regions of the 
earth will be governed, no one can foretell, but two things are 
certain—that the English language will be spoken through-, 
out them and that the Church of Rome will maintain the 
progress she has commenced this century among English-
speaking peoples. If every French-speaking person in the 
world is counted as a devout Catholic, the number of French-
speaking Catholics will long before that period be immeasur-
ably below that of the English-speaking Catholics; and the 
same may be said regarding the Italian and Spanish languages. 

Without waiting to realize the forecast that the English 
tongue is fated to be the chief language of the Roman Cath-
olic church, we may consider some of the effects already pro-
duced by the establishment of that religion among the English-
speaking people of America. Not the least achievement of 
that great branch of the Church which is now celebrating the 
centenary of its hierarchy is that it has saved the Roman 
Catholic religion from the reproach often heard in Europe 
that its growth is only found associated with social retro-
gression and reaction. In France this feeling has relegated 
religion to the cult of women, children and peasants, and in 
Ireland alone of European countries is the Church in sym-
pathy with democratic progress. 

Some Liberal critics may object that though Cardinal Gi bbons 
may be thoroughly imbued with the Democratic spirit it is 
not in harmony with the unchanging policy of Rome, which 



28 Romani Catholicism in America. \ 

is hostile to liberty; that the Church may profess the most 
Liberal doctrine while she is in a minority, but that if she 
obtained ascendency we might witness an auto da ft in Madi-
son Square. Cardinal Gibbons approaches the subject of relig-
ious persecution from the other extreme, and is so inspired 
with the charity which thinketh no evil that he protects the 
Protestant religions as well as the Catholic from the stigma 
of having countenanced persecution. In " Faith of our Fath-
ers " he writes, " From my heart I abhor and denounce every 
species of persecution of which the Spanish Inquisition may 
have been guilty;" and again in reference to the Massacre of 
St. Bartholomew he says, " I have no words strong enough to 
express my detestation of that inhuman slaughter;" but in 
both instances he denies that the Church was responsible, just 
as in another passage referring to the proscriptive measures of 
Protestants against the Church of Rome he says, " I know full 
well that these acts of cruelty form no part of the creed of the ^ 
Protestant Churches." 

I t is to be feared that more skeptical students of history 
cannot accept the Cardinal's view, and that the truth is that 
every Church has persecuted when it has had the power and 
the opportunity, so long as persecution was part of the econ-
omy of the religious and political life of the day. Even the 
Puritans who came to America to escape from the Anglicans 
who had in turn suffered at the hands of the Catholics did 
not leave the spirit of persecution behind in Europe, and it is 
well known how they put to death Quakers and burnt witches 
alive in their New England settlements. The most enlight-
ened Prince who ever sat on the throne of England, who more-
over secured the British constitution and the Protestant suc-
cession, consented to the torture and subsequent massacre of 
Cornelius de "Witt for a political offence, just a hundred years 
after St. Bartholomew. It is absolutely futile to defend or to 
condemn the religious and political methods of the past by 
the milder standard of to-day. "Homo homini lupus" is 
probably as true now as it ever was, but we live in an age of 
anaesthetics. 



29 Romani Catholicism in America. 
The policy of the Church iu Spain during the present cen-

tury may perhaps be cited to show that the spirit of intoler-
ance is not yet dead; but in answer to this it may be pointed 
out that in modern times churches and religious sects are often 
in matters of conduct strongly influenced by the atmosphere 
of the country in which they are placed. For example, a 
Scotch Presbyterian minister will denounce Sunday amuse-
ments as a deadly sin, while a Dutch predicant, holding pre-
cisely the same theological tenets, will after morning service 
spend his Sunday afternoon in the Bosch at the Hague listen-
ing to what his Scottish co-religionist would call godless 
music. Cardinal Gibbons again, in his forthcoming work 
< l Our Christian Heritage," in a chapter on " The Religious 
Element in our American Civilization," points with pride to 
the national observance of the Christian Sabbath, which his 
distinguished colleague in the Sacred College, Cardinal San 
Eelice of Naples, would regard as merely local usage. The 
most remarkable instance, however, of public opinion mould-
ing the policy of Christian churches used to be found in the 
United States, when throughout the eleven Slave States of 
the Union ministers of religion in their own pulpits and 
assembled in synods, presbyteries and conferences, used to 
declare " that, as the Great Head of the Church has recog-
nized the relation of master and slave, we conscientiously 
believe that slavery is not a sin against God." Slavery was 
abolished; public sentiment accepted the inevitable; and the 
clergy of the Southern States ceased to take their texts from 
the Epistle to Philemon. 

Cardinal Gibbons's opportunism is not of this description. 
His denunciation of monopolies in his memorial to the Holy 
See is as courageous an act in the America of to-day as the 
denunciation of slavery would have been in the Southern 
States thirty years ago. The illustrations of the influence 
exercised by public opinion on religious policy were only 
given to show that though Spain under a certain regime 
might foster intolerance in the Church, a country like Amer-



30 Romani Catholicism in America. 
ica could find no room for a religion of reactionary tendency, 
and the fact that the Catholic Church has taken root in that 
land and is flourishing is the best proof that in the United 
States she is abreast with the democratic movement and with 
liberal progress. 

If France is the eldest daughter of the Church, America is 
destined to be her strongest and biggest child, and it will be 
interesting to watch this youngest daughter maintaining the 
position she has already secured in the intimate councils of 
the .Church. If the elder branches were well advised they 
would look to America to provide the Church Universal with 
a ruler. All the best friends of the Papacy, outside the 
" Italian ring " which fences it round, are agreed that the time 
has come when it would be for the highest interest of the 
Church to break down the tradition of the last three centuries 
and a half which prescribes that the occupant of St. Peter's 
chair shall invariably be an Italian. We have seen how the 
Church has gained a stronger title than ever to its claim of 
universality, but the constitution of the Sacred College is 
Italian and not cosmopolitan. The full complement of that 
august body consists of seventy cardinals. The present num-
ber, since the recent death of Cardinal Schiaffino, is sixty-five. 
Ten of them are Austrian, German, Hungarian and JPolish; 
seven are French; five are British subjects (of whom one is 
French Canadian); four are Spanish; two Portuguese; one 
Belgian, and one American : thirty representing all the nation-
alities of the world, and thirty-five being Italians. 

With this Italian preponderance, the other nationalities 
would have less ground of complaint if at the Vatican there 
were a corresponding council of state, in which the non-Italian 
Catholics were represented even in the inadequate proportion 
of thirty to thirty-five, but the intimate advisers of the Sov-
ereign Pontiff are all Italians, who, with one or two excep-
tions, can neither read nor speak a word of English. For 
charm of manner, a polished Italian prelate is unrivalled, but 
his knowledge of the English-speaking world is that of a 



31 Romani Catholicism in America. 
little child. The most accomplished Italian priest, even if he 
has been occasionally employed on a mission to a Catholic 
court, has no comprehension of constitutional government, 
still less is he capable of understanding the democratic move-
ment of the age. The Vatican has a certain aptitude in deal-
ing with " sovereigns and statesmen," to use Lord Beacons-
field's expression, but we have seen how Cardinal Gibbons 
reminded the Sacred Congregation, on the great authority of 
Cardinal Manning, that in the coming era the Church will 
have to treat, not with princes and parliaments, but with the 
masses of the people. 

Although there is no immediate prospect of a vacancy in 
the Holy See, predictions are constantly* being made as to the 
successor to Leo the Thirteenth. These journalistic prophe-
cies are of no value whatever, excepting from the significant 
unanimity with which they make the coming Pontiff an 
Italian. Sometimes the Conservative Vicar-General of the 
Pope, Cardinal Parocchi, is designated. Sometimes it is the 
Liberal Archbishop of Naples or the Liberal Patriarch of 
Venice. Cardinal San Felice is famous for his courageous 
devotion to the sufferers during the cholera at Naples, when 
he accompanied King Humbert through the hospitals :—but 
I remember witnessing a more courageous act on the part of 
Cardinal Agostini at Venice, when he officiated at the christ-
ening by Queen Margherita of an ironclad with the significant 
name of " Galileo," in the official presence of Signor Crispi, 
who, on his recent appointment to the ministry of Signor 
Depretis, had been denounced by the clerical journals as an 
excommunicate. The election of either the Neapolitan or the 
Venetian Cardinal would doubtless ensure a modus vivendi 
between the Vatican and the Italian Government, but the 
Church needs a ruler whose wisdom and enlightenment is 
capable of dealing with farther-reaching questions than those 
which relate to the limits of the kingdom of Italy. 

I t would have been a happy choice for the Church, and 
one the importance of which it is impossible to exaggerate, if 



32 Romani Catholicism in America. 
the Sacred College had in its wisdom selected as its successor 
to Pius the Ninth the great Cardinal who is at the head .of 
every religious and social movement in this country; but 
what the Church Universal would have gained, England 
would have lost. Cardinal Manning occupies a unique place 
in English history; there is no other instance of an individ-
ual exercising similar power and influence in this country, 
who has not been aided by legislative or official rank. I t is 
probable that the Cardinal is content with his unprecedented 
position, yet it is strange in these days when much is talked 
about strengthening the Upper House by giving it a represen-
tative character, that no Prime Minister has ever seen fit to 
advise the offer of a place in it to the eminent Englishman 
who represents not only all the Catholic population of these 
islands, but the entire struggling populace of our cities, of 
every creed, and without a creed. A peerage would' confer no 
dignity or even precedence on Cardinal Manning, as by the 
Queen's sign manual, he was, on the Royal Commission on 
the Housing of the Working Classes, with the assent of the 
Heir to the Throne, and the present Prime Minister, who 
were members of it, assigned precedence immediately after 
the Royal Family. I t is a long drop from the chair of St. 
Peter to a seat in the House of Lords, and there is a certain 
bathos in associating a modern coronet with the venerable 
head which might have worn most worthily the triple tiara. 

Although Cardinal Manning would have been the most 
powerful pontiff since Hildebrand, everyone who has the 
slightest knowledge of feeling on the continent is aware that 
an English Pope would be placed in a situation of peculiar 
difficulty on account of his nationality. Italy might object 
to a French Pope; Portugal might be jealous of a Spanish 
Pope; but the appointment of an Englishman to the Holy 
See would excite the animosity and the intrigue of every gov-
ernment on the continent. 

The United States stand in a very different relation to the 
powers of Europe. All the continental nations have a friendly 



33 Romani Catholicism in America. 
feeling for America—a sentiment which Americans will retain 
as long as they steer clear of international complications into 
which Samoan and Cuban entanglements might draw them. 
I t is to be feared that the friendliness of the continental powers 
for America is stimulated by the idea that America as a nation 
has not too much love for Great Britain. Monsignor Keane 
is said to have recently given at Nashville some reasons why an 
American should not be elevated to the Papacy. The Rector 
of the Catholic University at Washington is reported to have 
stated that " an American, no matter how learned and how 
well posted in European affairs, is thoroughly unfitted to fill 
the Papal See. The Pope must be a thorough cosmopolitan. 
He must be conversant with the political and spiritual con-
ditions of France, Germany and Spain. No American can 
grasp the situation in all its details. His educational sur-
roundings and life are totally different from that of the man 
who is fitted to fill the Papacy." Now, it seems to me that 
the learned Bishop is too modest on behalf of his countrymen. 
A British traveler who has taken a superficial view of Amer-
ica might come back and declare that the only cosmopolitans 
to be found in the United States are the American maidens, 
whose knowledge of the world is undoubtedly as profound as 
it is amazing. The American politician is rarely a man of 
the world, but America takes no pride in her politicians; the 
American man of business frequently looks upon Wall Street 
as the centre of the universe; and the American man of fashion 
is a maladroit travesty of an Englishman. But the manhood 
of America does not wholly consist of such as these. The 
shrewd American nature is the best foundation for knowledge 
of the world as soon as it is removed from the narrow horizon 
of American life to which the Bishop refers. What more 
thorough cosmopolitans are to be found in any capital of 
Europe than certain diplomatic representatives of the United 
States ? They have had no advantage in training; they are 
taken from the lawyer's desk or the professor's chair, yet 
they are able to hold their own with, and win the admiration 

3 



34 Romani Catholicism in America. 
of, the most accomplished products of our old European civ-
ilization. I t is the success of these men in adapting them-
selves to unfamiliar surroundings, and in forming confidential 
relations with statesmen and potentates often denied to diplo-
mats de la carridre, which makes one believe that, from the 
worldly point of view, the highest position in Europe could 
be worthily filled by an American. 

Of the ecclesiastical qualifications of Cardinal Gibbons for 
the most exalted honor in the Church's gift, it is not for a 
layman to speak. I t is enough that the Holy See has seen 
fit to set him at the head of one of the most powerful and 
perhaps the most intelligent hierarchy in the world, and that 
the Vatican has paid unprecedented respect to his counsel. 
Of his fitness as a man of affairs and of his knowledge of the 
world I have had some opportunity of forming a judgment. 
During many months of travel and residence in the United 
States and Canada my observations led me to the conclusion 
that the North American continent has produced in this gen-
eration two really great men, in the sense that the last genera-
tion accounted Lincoln and Cavour as great. One of them 
we have the honor of reckoning as a fellow-subject of the 
Queen, Sir John Macdonald, the Prime Minister of our 
Canadian Dominion. The other, the Cardinal Archbishop 
of Baltimore, although twenty years his junior, is his equal 
in marvellous knowledge of men, and, although in some 
respects of singularly different nature, resembles him in the 
possession of that lofty opportunism which is the essential of 
all true statesmanship. Cardinal Gibbons combines the suav-
ity of an Italian monsignore with that ingenuous integrity 
and robustness which we like to think is the characteristic of 
our Anglo-Saxon race. If he were called to occupy the. most 
conspicuous and most ancient throne in Christendom he would 
not go to Europe as a novice in European affairs. To have 
assisted at an (Ecumenical Council at an age when most men are 
on the threshold of a career is an early training in cosmopol-
itanism rarely experienced. During the intervening twenty 



35 Romani Catholicism in America. 
years the Cardinal's frequent visits to Europe have brought 
him into contact with some of the acutest intellects of the 
Old World. Moreover, since his elevation twelve years ago 
to the head of the hierarchy of the United States he has gov-
erned an episcopate and a priesthood which are composed of 
members of every European nation. His unexampled under-
taking two years ago, when, the youngest member of the 
Sacred College, he prevailed upon the Holy See to reconsider 
a momentous judgment, was not the achievement of a man 
whose attributes are merely local and national. The installa-
tion in the chair of St. Peter of this enlightened English-
speaking Churchman would be an event of such import to 
human society that one dares not hope to see its accomplish-
ment, for it seems as if it would be the first step towards 
bringing back to the Church the great democracies which are 
destined to govern the world, and as if it would hasten the 
time when " unum ovile fiet et unus pastor." 





f 

THE CATHOLIC DEMOCRACY OF 
AMERICA. 

1. Life and Times of the Most Rem. John Carroll, Bishop and First Archbishop 
of Baltimore. By J O H N G I L M A B Y S H E A . New York: 1888. 

2 . History of the Catholic Church in the United States. By H E N R Y D E COUBCY 
and J O H N G I L M A B Y S H E A . New York: 1879. 

3. The Faith of Owr Fathers. By J A M E S , C A R D I N A L GIBBONS, Archbishop 
of Baltimore. 31st Edition. Baltimore: 1887. 

4. Owr Christian Heritage. By J A M E S , C A B D I N A L GIBBONS, Archbishop of 
Baltimore. Baltimore: 1889. 

5. Souvenir Volume of the Centenary Celebration and Catholic Congress. Detroit: 
1890. 

I t is just half a century since, in the pages of this review, 
Macaulay wrote his great essay upon the Papacy. The moment 
of the appearance of that remarkable contribution to ecclesias-
tical history gives to it now a peculiar value. The year 1840 
stands halfway between the French Revolution and the present 
day, but the changes which have taken place in the world 
since the commencement of the Victorian era have brought 
with them greater and swifter alterations in the political status 
of the Church and in its relations with the peoples of the earth 
than have occurred not only in the previous half-century, but 
probably in all the previous ages since the foundation of 
Christianity. 

I t would be foreign to our purpose to describe the position 
of the Roman Catholic Church among the nations fifty years 
ago. Suffice it to say that in Italy Italian Unity was as yet 

If 37 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 38 
an idle dream; Garibaldi was at Montevideo nourishing greater 
griefs against Charles Albert of Piedmont than against Gregory 
X V I . , who then sat on the Papal throne. Pius I X . was a 
novice in the Sacred College, created that year Cardinal Arch-
bishop of Imola; the flight to Gaeta and the siege of Rome 
were yet to come. In England eleven years had elapsed since 
Catholic emancipation ; eleven were to follow before a recru-
descence of anti-Papal feeling took shape in the Ecclesiastical 
Titles Bill. The Oxford movement had begun, but Tract 
XC. had not yet shaken the Establishment. Six years later 
an event was to take place in the Sister Kingdom of deeper 
effect on the destiny of the Roman Church than the schemes 
of legislators or the dialectics of theologians, when the Irish 
famine drove across the Atlantic almost a nation of emigrants, 
carrying with them their ancient faith. 

I t is evident, therefore, that when Macauley wrote that the 
Church's "acquisitions in the New World have more than 
compensated for what she has lost in the Old," he could not 
have anticipated what was about to happen. The illustrious 
reviewer displayed his foresight when, proceeding to describe 
how " her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries 
which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn," 
he prophesized that those countries might a century thence 
contain a population equal to that which then inhabited 
Europe; but his coupling of South with North America, taken 
together with his mention of the Missouri Valley (at that time 
the remotest boundary of civilization), shows that he looked 
for the growth of Roman Catholicism in the Northern Con-
tinent to develop from the settlements of the French and 
Spanish races from St. Louis to Natchez and New Orleans. 
Yet even then the Roman hierarchy in the United States, 
which has just celebrated its centenary, had already reached 
jts jubilee. I t is the policy of the Roman Catholic Church 
to leave nothing to chance. Her claims to Divine institution 
have never interfered with the perfection of human organiza-
tion. A stream of migration from Europe to America had 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 39 
been steadily progressing as the years went by, and as the 
Church gradually grew in prosperity, so her machinery was 
strengthened and elaborated. The Irish famine occurred just 
at the moment when improved means of communication were 
on the eve of revolutionizing the world, and with the immigra-
tion from Ireland came by degrees a population only less vast 
from Germany. Teuton, no less than Celt, if born in the 
Roman Church, found raised for him, in the land where he 
and his children were destined to lose all characteristics of race 
and nationality, the altars at which he might worship with 
unchanging and familar rite in the faith of his fathers. 

We propose to trace the growth of the Roman Catholic 
Church in the United States, briefly describing how, from a 
small and quasi-aristocratic sect in a small corner of the 
British colonies and from a missionary propaganda among the 
Indian tribes in other portions of the territory now under the 
American flag, it has developed into one of the most powerful 
and most democratic religious communities which the world 
has ever seen, and one which is fated to leave a lasting mark 
on the history of Christendom. I t is not our purpose to 
recount the romantic story of missionary enterprise and mar-
tyrdom among the native races, nor to relate the narrative of 
the French Canadian settlement which has preserved to this 
day on British soil the tradition of the ancient regime of 
Catholic France—picturesque subjects which have found a 
worthy historian in Parkman, whose glowing pages save his 
country from the reproach that literature is dead in the United 
States. 

That the first discovery of the American Continent was 
made by Catholic adventurers—from Cabot and Columbus to 
Carrier—and possession proclaimed in the name of Catholic 
monarchs before the sires of the Pilgrim Fathers were born 
is common knowledge. I t is a matter of uncertainty to iden-
tify the spot on the territory now included in the United 
States where the sacraments of the Church were first adminis-
tered, and it is not for us to decide whether Ponce de Leon's 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 40 
followers first said Mass on the shores of Florida or whether 
it was first celebrated under the flag of France on an island off 
the coast of Maine thenceforth known as Sainte Croix. I t 
was not, however, on French or on Spanish soil that the 
foundations of the English-speaking Catholic Church in 
America were laid, but in a British settlement lying halfway 
between Maine and Florida, when, in 1634, Leonard Calvert, 
by right of the charter granted to his father—Lord Baltimore 
—sailed up the Potomac and named the colony Maryland in 
honor of King Charles's Catholic queen. 

We have before us two volumes which contain substantial 
groundwork for a history of Roman Catholicism in the 
United States. One of them—the " Life and Times of Arch-
bishop Carroll," by Mr. John Gilmary Shea—admirably 
carries out the promise of its title-page, which describes the 
work as embracing the history of the Catholic Church in 
the United States from 1735 to 1815, the span of life of the 
remarkable personage who was the first bishop of the 
American hierarchy. As we have little but praise to 
bestow upon this valuable contribution to national and eccle-
siastical history, we may be permitted to express our candid 
opinion upon the other, seeing that half the authorship 
of the "History of the Catholic Church in the United 
States " is ascribed to Mr. Shea. I t is possible that he may 
have supplied some of the material used in the volume; it 
is difficult to believe that so learned and conscientious a 
writer can have had any share in the compilation of this 
ill-printed, ill-arranged, ill-written book. Hidden among 
pages of trivial narrative related in pitiable English, there are 
to be found the undoubted results of labor and research, but 
their discovery is a painful task. The authors' style may be 
judged from their use of the word " deformer " as a humorous 
method of spelling " reformer," or from their italicising a Con-
gressman's prefix of " Honorable " when they wish in sarcasm 
to show their disapproval of his conduct. If the work is 
intended to rank as a serious history, the introduction of this 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 41 
kind of thing is an affront to the intelligent public of America; 
if it is intended as a popular manual, we would point out that 
writers on great subjects are in duty bound to endeavor to 
raise the tone of the audience they address. Considerable space 
is devoted to an exposure of slanderous libels uttered by 
worthless enemies of the Church, but we doubt if the bitterest 
Orangeman in the Union ever published worse libels than 
the portraits which in this volume are made to represent cer-
tain venerable prelates. In the United States—of all coun-
tries in the world—there is no excuse for adorning the 
cheapest of editions with gross illustrations. Mr. Shea's Life 
of the Archbishop, which is, however, a comparatively costly 
work, is illustrated with remarkable skill, and the pictures 
and facsimiles which accompany the letterpress are in many 
instances of high interest. 

Before the Revolution, in only two of the colonies of Great 
Britain now included in the United States was the exercise of 
the Roman Catholic religion permitted—in the feudal settle-
ments of Maryland and Pennsylvania. The first Lord Balti-
more, towards the end of the reign of James I., had, on abjur-
ing Protestantism, given up his offices under the Crown and 
accepted a grant of territory in Newfoundland. After Ms 
efforts to settle that portion of the island known as Avalon 
he migrated to Virginia, where he found a difficulty in the 
oath of the king's supremacy which was required of settlers 
in that loyal colony. 

" Then it was that Lord Baltimore solicited a charter which would per-
mit the Catholics to practise their worship undisturbed in one spot on the 
shores of America. His request was granted and Maryland was ceded to 
him, subject only to the yearly homage of two Indian arrows, and the pay-
ment iuto the royal exchequer of one-fifth of the gold and silver drawn 
from the mines. Lord Baltimore died in 1632, at the very moment when 
this charter was issuing. His eldest son, Cecil Calvert inherited his rights, 
but he had not the energy to direct the expedition in person, and to 
Leonard Calvert, second son of George, Lord Baltimore, is due the honor 
of having founded Maryland." 

I t was on the Feast of the Annunciation 1634 that two 
little vessels, the " A r k " and the " Dove," sailed up the noble 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 42 
estuary of the Potomac—familiar to many English travellers 
who have gazed upon the wooded landscape stretching over 
the States of Virginia and Maryland from the summit of the 
lofty obelisk which is reared behind the White House, or who 
have gone down-stream from Washington on a pilgrimage to 
Mount Yernon, the home of the hero of American Independ-
ence. Two hundred families were on board, most of them 
Catholic refugees from the penal laws of the old country, and, 
when they landed, their first act among the trees on the river-
side was to hear Mass said and the Litany of the Cross by 
Father White, one of those restless, energetic English Jesuits 
of Continental training who played a most active part in the 
History of England till the last struggle was ended for the 
Stuart dynasty. Lord Baltimore had entrusted the charge of 
his Maryland settlers to this zealous priest and to another 
member of the Order, about whose name there is some uncer-
tainty, as those were the days—which were to continue for 
many a year—when a succession of names and a series of 
disguises were of necessity part of the paraphernalia of every 
Jesuit father. We shall soon see the great share which mem-
bers of the Society of Jesus had in establishing and strength-
ening the Catholic faith in the American Republic a century 
and a half later. 

The Catholic founders of Maryland openly proclaimed the 
liberty of Christian worship in the colony at a time when the 
.Roman Catholic religion was rigorously repressed by every 
Protestant government in Europe, and by all the other 
English colonies in America, for Pennsylvania was not 
founded until nearly half a century later. The great Pro-
testant historian of the United States—Mr. Bancroft—bears 
testimony to this magnanimous policy where he describes how 
" the Catholics took quiet possession, and religious liberty 
obtained a home—its only home in the wide world—at the 
humble village which bore the name of St. Mary's. . . . 
The Boman Catholics who were oppressed by the laws of 
England were sure to find a peaceful asylum in the quiet 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 43 
harbors of the Chesapeake, and there, too, Protestants were 
sheltered against Protestant intolerance." 

The authors of " T h e Catholic Church in the United States " 
refuse to give to the Calverts and their followers any credit 
for their principles of toleration:— 

" To gain entrance to Lord Baltimore's vast domains was necessary to 
believe in the divinity of Christ; but if, even with this restriction, the con-
duct of the founders of Maryland is the object of so much eulogy in Amer-
ica, we must claim our right to hesitate in joining in it. . . . When a 
State has the happiness of possessing unity of religion, and that religion 
the truth, we cannot conceive how the government can facilitate the divi-
sion of creeds. Lord Baltimore had seen too well how the English Cath-
olics were crushed by the Protestants as soon as they were the strongest 
and most numerous; he should have foreseen that it would be so in Mary-
land, so that the English Catholics, instead of finding liberty in America, 
only changed their bondage. Instead, then, of admiring the liberality of 
Lord Baltimore,, we prefer to believe that he obtained his charter from 
Charles I. only on the formal condition of admitting Protestants on an 
equal footing with Catholics." 
I t is difficult to conceive that these words were written in the 
United States of America, by American citizens, in the last 
quarter of the nineteenth century. I t is fortunate for Catho-
licism that the sagacious chiefs of the American hierarchy 
have not shared this regret that the Roman Catholic Church 
was not established in perpetuity as a local sect, instead of 
having become, by their wise policy, working freely in a free 
country, the most powerful religious community in the most 
prosperous nation of the world. Supposing that the founders 
of the Republic had favored this idea of local sectarianism 
and that America had become a nation notwithstanding, 
would these historians, for the sake of preserving Catholic 
uniformity in Maryland, submit to arrest on crossing the 
Potomac at Harper's Ferry because the State of Virginia 
required subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles? Would 
they like to read in the Philadelphia "Ledger" how a Quaker 
and his wife from Pennsylvania had been hanged by the 
Independents on Boston Common as the penalty of a little 
tour in Massachusetts, which Puritan State, under the policy 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 44 
they decry, now contains three-quarters of a million of Catho-
lics? Would they consider it agreeable for the summer 
crowds which throng the Newport beach to be forcibly bap--
tized by immersion, according to the Rhode Island creed ? 

I t is the great glory of the Catholic Church in the United 
States that it has never been a persecuting body, and those 
blind guides who regret that in her early days she did not vie 
with the colonizing Protestant sects in their intolerance must 
be Catholics of that retrograde type of mind who in Conti-
tental Europe have made Roman Catholicism synonymous 
with reaction, against the spirit of which the enlightened car-
dinal now at the head of the American hierarchy has waged 
at least one bold and successful fight. These regretful admir-
ers of an intolerant exclusiveness justify their sentiments by 
the sufferings undergone by the Maryland Catholics in conse-
quence of Lord Baltimore's liberal policy, but we believe that 
the present position in Christendom of the Catholic Church 
in America is in no small measure due to the generous tradi-
tion of its earliest home in Maryland, " the cradle of civil and 
religious liberty," and also that the harsh discipline of a cen-
tury produced a sturdier race of faithful sons to uphold the 
Church in the young republic. 

" Maryland was the abode of happiness and liberty," says 
the venerable Bancroft; "conscience was without restraint. 
A mild and liberal proprietary conceded every measure which 
the welfare of the colony required: domestic union, increasing 
immigration, a productive commerce, a fertile soil which 
heaven had richly favored with rivers and deep bays, united 
to perfect the scene of colonial felicity." In order to further 
the interests of this settlement Lord Baltimore even urged 
Puritans of Massachusetts to migrate to Maryland, offering 
them lands,.privileges and religious freedom. There, in 1649, 
the Catholic majority of the General Assembly of the colony 
passed the famous 'Act concerning Religion,' which Cardinal 
Gibbons, in contrast to our quoted utterance of his timorous 
fellow-citizens of the laity, describes as a " noble statute," and 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 45 
one 1 which will reflect unfading glory on that State as long as 
liberty is cherished in the hearts of men." I t runs:— 

" Whereas the enforcing of conscience in matters of religion hath 
frequently fallen out to be of dangerous consequence in those common-
wealths where it has been practised, and for the more quiet and peaceable 
government of this province, and the better to preserve mutual love and 
unity amongst the inhabitants, no person whatsoever within this province 
professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall be anyways troubled or molested 
for his religion, nor in the free exercise thereof, nor anyway compelled to 
the belief or exercise of any other religion against his consent." 

If the grim and narrow religious tests of the New England 
governments be compared with the Maryland profession of 
Christianity it will not be a matter of wonder that the Protes-
tant historian we have quoted, himself a New Englander, 
declared that here " Conscience was without restraint." 

The same eminent writer proceeds to describe how the dis-
franchised friends of prelacy from Massachusetts, and the 
Puritans from Virginia, were welcomed to equal liberty of 
conscience and political rights in Roman Catholic Maryland, 
and he tells the shameful story how, five years later, when the 
Puritans gained the ascendancy in the colony, they had neither 
the gratitude to respect the rights of the government by which 
they had been hospitably received, nor the magnanimity to 
continue the toleration which alone had enabled them to 
reside in Maryland. I t was now the turn of the Puritan 
majority to pass " an Act concerning religion," which forbade 
liberty of conscience to be extended to " Popery, prelacy or 
licentiousness of opinion." 

Nearly forty years later this contraband § prelacy " became 
predominant, and in 1692 the Assembly established the Angli-
can Church in Maryland, erecting parishes throughout the 
colony, and levying a tax on all citizens for the support of the 
clergy, and in 1704 was passed "an Act to prevent the increase 
of Popery in the province," which inter alia enabled a child 
born of Catholic parents, on becoming a Protestant, to exact 
from its father in his lifetime the share of his property which 
would otherwise devolve upon it after his death. Roman 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 46 
Catholics henceforward for seventy years were only permitted 
to hear mass in their own families within their own grounds. 
Subsequently the Assembly voted that Papists should pay 
double the tax levied upon Protestants, and oppression became 
so burdensome that Daniel Carroll, the father of the first 
American bishop, sailed to France to negotiate with Louis 
X V . the emigration of the Maryland Catholics to Louisiana, 
but the most Christian king declined the offer, having no 
ambition concerning his Mississippi domains, soon to be ceded 
to Spain. 

We must not pause to describe the small accession to the 
Catholic community by the arrival of a small band of Acadi-
ans after the deportation from Nova Scotia in 1756 of the 
French peasant community, an episode which has been related 
with such picturesque pathos by Longfellow in < Evangeline' 
that the equally distinguished son of Harvard, Parkman, has 
suggested that the poet's fancy mistook Acadia for Arcadia. 
Nor can we dwell upon the domestic life of the Marylanders, 
which, by reason of the manorial system established by the 
Calverts, was quasi-aristocratic in its character, and into which 
the penal laws had introduced conditions not unlike those to 
which the Catholic gentry in England submitted during the 
eighteenth century. 

The neighboring colony of Pennylvania, which, like Mary-
land, was founded on a feudal basis, was the only other 
British settlement in which the Eoman Catholic religion was 
tolerated before the Eevolution. William Penn, in establish-
ing his magnanimous code, not only acted according to the 
tolerant principles of the Society of Friends, but he also was 
able to adopt a policy acceptable to King James I I . , whose 
favor he enjoyed, and, the City of Brotherly Love having been 
laid out in 1683, we find that as early as 1686 the offices of 
the Church were celebrated in a wooden building which stood 
on the site of what is now Wall Street, Philadelphia. The 
German immigration to America is often spoken of as if it 
were entirely a phenomenon of this century, yet in 1757 the 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 47 
German Catholics in Philadelphia outnumbered those who 
spoke English. A remarkable relic of this period and region 
is a manuscript missal in duplicate written in characters clearer 
than print by the Jesuit Father Schneider, who was too poor to 
buy mass-books from Europe, and the distance between his 
mission stations was so great that he undertook the laborious 
task in order to lighten the load he had to carry as he tramped 
through the Delaware valley. At this time there were in 
Pennsylvania about 3,000 " customers," that is, adult Roman 
Catholic communicants, and in Maryland about 10,000. 
The non-communicant Catholics under age are reckoned to 
have been about the same number in each colony. 

The settlement now known as the State of New York 
deserves a word of mention. When New Netherland was 
colonized the dominant party in Holland laid down in the 
charter that the Protestant religion as set forth by the Synod 
of Dort should be maintained by the Company. In 1664 
New York was captured by the British, and having passed 
into the hands of James, Duke of York and Albany (after 
whom the capital and the commercial port are named), a 
Roman Catholic governor was sent out from England in 
1683. Catholic influence in the colony seems -to have been 
only transient, as before the end of the century " there were 
only seven Papists—or, at most, seven Papist families—in 
New York," and in 1700 a law was passed declaring Jesuits 
and Popish priests incendiaries and disturbers of the peace. 
Thenceforward until the Revolution the history of the 
Catholic Religion in New York is almost a blank. In 1741 
a curious incident occurred. The negro slaves, who were a 
sixth of the then population of 12,000 were accused of a 
conspiracy to burn the city and massacre the inhabitants. The 
Reverend John Ury was condemned—it is said unjustly—as 
one of the white leaders of the plot, and he was put to death 
chiefly on the ground that he was a Catholic priest, but to this 
day the doubt has never been cleared up whether he was a 
Roman ecclesiastic or a nonjuring Anglican divine. I t is an 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 48 
interesting fact that eleven of the convicted negroes were 
burned at the stake, as it is the boast of the descendants of 
New England Puritans that in their neighboring colonies, 
though death was the penalty for every form of heresy—from 
Quakerism to witchcraft—the cord was the invariable capital 
instrument, and a recent writer has been severely criticised in 
America for having asserted that the progeny of the Pilgrim 
Fathers burned their witches.1 

Of the vicissitudes of the missionaries of Rome in the Puri-
tan settlements it is not our purpose to speak, as in New 
England prior to the Revolution there was practically no 
Catholic population. Nor shall we attempt to describe the 
position of the Church in the French and Spanish territories 
which are now included in the United States, interesting as it 
would be to show how the colonists of France and Spain, to 
say nothing of the Minorcans, Greeks, and Italians in Florida, 
helped to lay the foundations of the heterogeneous American 
nation. I t may be mentioned that after the capitulation of 
Canada by France to Great Britain the free exercise of Catho-
lic religion secured to the Canadians by the Treaty of Paris 
was extended to the inhabitants of the simultaneously ceded 
region, which now includes Northern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, 
Michigan, and Wisconsin; but these settlements, as well as 
those on the Mississippi, were retained under the jurisdiction 
of the Bishop of Quebec. 

We have now approached the eve of the change of things, 
when America was about to become a nation. Forty years 
on from the Declaration of Independence the history of the 
Catholic Democracy of the United States, which commenced 
at that epoch, is identified with the life and office of the re-
markable man who first among American citizens wore the 
mitre, and for the better understanding of his work and influ-
ence we must go back for some years and away from the 
Western Hemisphere while we briefly trace his early career. 

1 Roman Catholicism in America. Nineteenth Century, Nov., 1889. 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 49 
John Carroll, the future Archbishop of Baltimore, was born 

in 1735 at Upper Marlborough, in the division of Maryland, 
known as Prince George's County, the name of which marks 
the setting up of the Protestant succession in the old country. 
His birthplace, a modest frame cottage, recently standing 
about halfway between Washington and Chesapeake Bay. 
His father—Daniel Carroll—had early in the century, in 
spite of penal laws, migrated from Ireland to Maryland, 
where some of his kindred had already settled. At the age 
of twelve he was sent to a Jesuit college at Bohemia, estab-
lished by the Society, not far from the frontier of Pennsyl-
vania, so that refuge might be easy in the tolerant Quaker 
province in case of interference by the Maryland officials, and 
one of his fellow pupils here was his kinsman, Charles Carroll, 
who became famous as a signer of the Declaration of Independ-
ence. His stay at this missionary school was brief, as before 
his father's death in 1750 we find him already a student in 
the great seminary of St. Omer. In spite of their disabilities, 
the English Catholic families had at this period an advantage 
over their countrymen of the same rank in that, instead of 
undergoing the somewhat rough and narrow training of the 
country-gentleman of the Walpole.era, they were sent abroad, 
where under the tuition of the most accomplished masters in 
Europe, they became conversant with the languages, the art, 
and the manners of the Continent. If the education of the 
Jesuits was polished and liberal as compared to that usually 
imparted to the untravelled Englishman, the contrast must 
have been prodigious between the young colonist so brought 
up and his neighbors who had led patriarchal lives of isola-
tion in the American plantations. Had John Carroll returned 
to the old homestead as a brilliant layman he doubtless would 
have been numbered with the leaders of the Revolution • but 
another destiny awaited him. 

In French Flanders he remained for eight years, spending 
the last two at Watten, a few miles from St. Omer, where 
was the novitiate of the English province of the order. He 

4 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 50 
had decided to enter the Society of Jesus, and after his period 
of discipline at Watten he was sent on to the Jesuit college at 
Liège to prepare for the priesthood. In 1759 he was ordained, 
and while preparing for his final vows he occupied at St. Omer, 
and again at Liège, a chair of philosophy, and not till 1771 did 
he take the final vows of a professed father. 

The Jesuit society had fallen on troublous times, and it was 
in France, in 1762, that the first open attack was made on the 
order. The college of St. Omer was consequently expelled 
from French territory and re-established at Bruges, on the 
invitation of the Austrian Government. While Father Carroll 
was reorganizing the seminary, in 1771, he was selected by the 
superiors to make the tour of Europe with the son of Lord 
Stourton, and had they a more direct connection with our sub-
ject, we should be tempted to dwell on his letters, written 
from places which were soon to be the scene of the most 
momentous changes in the modern history of the world. At 
Rome, however, events were proceeding which gravely con-
cerned the history of the Church in America, and the results 
of which to the present day are affecting one great Catholic 
community on the Western Continent. The young Jesuit 
priest, when he arrived on the banks of the Tiber with his 
pupil, found his order in the coldest shade of disfavor; its 
coming overthrow was publicly discussed, and lampoons on 
the Society were openly sold in the streets of the Eternal City. 
His position must have been one of peculiar delicacy. The 
Roman priesthood in the British colonies was subject to the 
Vicariate-Apostolic of England, and the person at the Vati-
can who exercised a controlling influence in all ecclesiasti-
cal appointments in Great Britain and her dependencies 
was Henry Stuart, Cardinal York, the arch-adversary of the 
Jesuits. Father Carroll, moreover, wag on terms of close 
intimacy with many of the English Catholic families of 
ancient lineage. The Stourtons, whose son he was educating, 
the Arundells of Ward our, whose friendship for him may 
have arisen from the tradition that Lady Baltimore was a 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 51 
daughter of their house, and the Welds of Lulworth, under 
whose roof he was later to receive the highest commission of 
the Church,'were Jacobites to a man. Cardinal York was 
then in the prime of life, and his active zeal against the 
Jesuits was the more redoubtable inasmuch as the Holy See 
recognized Charles Edward as King of England, though the 
story of Culloden was then a quarter of a century old. 

In 1773 Clement X I V suppressed the Society of Jesus 
throughout the world by the famous brief " Dominus ac 
Redemptor noster," a document with which all Englishmen 
who take an interest in the British Empire ought to be 
familiar, seeing that its far-reaching effects are still agitat-
ing the Province of Quebec, and the Dominion of Canada 
generally. Father Carroll repaired to Bruges, where he 
signed submission to the mandate when the commissaries 
of Maria Theresa came to take possession of the English 
college. The fathers were dispersed, their property seized, 
and John Carroll crossed over to England, where he retired 
to Wardour Castle, Lord Arundell, who was a count of the 
Holy Roman Empire, making a vain appeal to the Austrian 
Government. I t was not, however, a time for dignified re-
tirement. Events were taking place in America, compared 
to which the dissolution of the Jesuits was insignificant, and 
in June 1774 Father Carroll, bearing faculties as a secular 
priest, landed at Richmond, Virginia, from a vessel which 
was one of the last that ,cleared from England before the 
Revolution. He had left his native land a child of twelve, 
and not until his fortieth year did he rest again beneath the 
roof of his widowed mother. 

At the end of the previous year Bishop Challoner, the 
vicar-apostolic of the London district, had notified to " Messrs. 
the Missioners in Mariland and Pennsilvania," the dissolu-
tion of the Society of Jesus, which had worked in the former 
province for a hundred and thirty-nine years, and it was on 
the eve of the Revolution that the Jesuit fathers accepted the 
brief and became secular priests. We have seen how the 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 52 
western territory, south of Canada, was made subject to the 
Bishop of Quebec under the Quebec Act, which declared the 
exercise of the Catholic faith in those regions free from the 
operation of the penal laws, and this enactment was considered 
by the Protestant colonies as one of the last wrongs done 
to them by the British government. " We think," protested 
the Continental Congress of 1774, " t h e legislature of Great 
Britain is not authorized to establish a religion fraught with 
sanguinary and impious tenets." The address in which the 
passage occurs was the work of John Jay, of whose interfer-
ence on this occasion it has been said that " all Canada would 
have been won but for the influence of John Jay's bigoted 
address to the people of England, in which the Canadians 
and their religion were assailed in the grossest terms." I t 
appears certain that the Protestant demonstration at New York, 
after the Quebec Act, drove a colony of Roman Catholic 
Highlanders from the Mohawk valley into Canada, and the 
loyalty of the Canadian Catholics was so great to the govern-
ment which protected them that the same bishop who censured a 
French priest for admitting to the sacraments Canadians serv-
ing in the American army, likewise reprimanded him for his 
courtesy in receiving at his house in Montreal the Rev. John 
Carroll. 

The leaders of the revolution soon recognized that this was 
not a moment for sectarian jealousy and division. Father 
Carroll's journey to Canada was for the purpose of urging 
the Canadians to remain neutral, a mission which he undertook 
at the request of the Continental Congress, early in 1776, 
which in little more than a year had learned wisdom. The 
great opportunist, who had the chief individual share in 
making the United States a nation, had given religious intol-
erance a lesson three months previously. On arriving in 
camp before Boston, after Lexington and Bunker's Hill, 
General Washington found preparations being made for the 
celebration of Gunpowder Plot—" Pope Day," as it was called 
in New England—and in Puritan Massachusetts the Virginian 



( The Catholic Democracy of Americd. 53 
gentleman of Church of England tradition issued the following 
order:— 

"As the commander-in-chief has been apprised of a design formed for the 
observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the effigy of 
the Pope, he cannot help expressing his surprise that there are officers and 
soldiers in this army so void of common sense as not to see the impropriety 
of the step at this juncture, when we are soliciting the friendship and 
alliance of the people of Canada . . . . when to be insulting their religion 
is so monstrous as not to be suffered or excused." 

Neither the overtures of Washington nor did subsequent 
efforts divert the allegiance of the Canadians, but meanwhile 
the Roman Catholics in the revolted colonies were displaying 
active zeal for the Revolution, and now circumstances arose 
which were destined to establish their Church in an impreg-
nable position in the new nation. Early in the war it became 
evident that the ultimate success of the colonists depended on 
their receiving recognition from some great European power, 
and the colonies, which a quarter of a century before had 
given their sons and their treasure to wrest Canada from 
France, now turned to the French king to help them in 
denuding England of her transatlantic possessions. French 
officers, like Lafayette, had already been leading the untrained 
levies of the Continental Congress, and at last Louis X V I . 
concluded a treaty of amity and commerce with the United 
States, thus formally recognizing the new republic as an 
independent nation. French fleets were soon seen in Ameri-
can waters, and a French army was welcomed on American 
soil. The missionaries of Rome had been barely tolerated in 
the limited districts of the colonies where they had labored; 
now came Catholic chaplains of the foreign legations, the first 
diplomatic circle in the United States being entirely Catholic, 
and naval and military almoners celebrating mass on the 
men-of-war and in the camps and cities. The alliance of the 
French with the colonial revolutionists, which was one of the 
abetting causes of the downfall of the royal dynasty and the 
despoiling of the Church in France, became on the continent 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 54 
they liberated the foundation of the fabric of American 
Catholicism which in a century has grown to be the strongest 
and the most solid in Christendom. 

Complete religious liberty in the emancipated States was 
not secured in a day, nor in a generation, but there was a 
general feeling that the Church to which Lafayette and 
Yaudreuil belonged was not only socially and politically 
reputable, but also not antagonistic to American freedom. 
At first only in Maryland and Pennsylvania, where liberty 
of conscience, as we have seen, was traditional, in Delaware, 
which is geographically a portion of Maryland, and in George 
Washington's native Virginia, were all civil rights without 
distinction or diminution extended to Catholics. In Con-
necticut and Georgia almost alj restrictions were swept away. 
In Rhode Island the law denying toleration to Catholics was 
expunged from the statute book on the appearance of the 
French fleet off Newport. New Jersey made the profession 
of a Protestant faith the test of holding office. Massachusetts 
granted liberty of conscience, but permitted the support of 
Protestant worship out of the taxes. New York, in spite 
of the liberal efforts of Governeur Morris and Philip Living-
stone, imposed conditions which virtually excluded Catholics 
from the legislature. New Hampshire enacted that the 
members of its House of Representatives should be Protes-
tants, a provision which was till recently on the statute book ; 
and the two Carolinas likewise imposed a Protestant test. 
Great as was the advantage given to Roman Catholicism by 
the Revolution and the French alliance, it is none the less 
certain that the faith which is now professed by the most 
powerful religious community in the Union had not a fair 
start with the creeds of other denominations at the birth of 
the new nation. 

The Tory party made great efforts to excite the old anti-
Catholic prejudice against the American cause, and, because 
the French chaplains in New England were now permitted 
to celebrate mass and to parade the streets in religious pro-



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 55 
cessions, the united empire royalists taunted the Puritans 
that, just as Popery was recognized in Canada, it was now as 
much established in their States as any other religion. On 
the other hand, the British government hoped to draw some of 
the Catholics in the revolted colonies into the military service 
of the king. I t was accordingly proposed to raise a regiment of 
Roman Catholic volunteers. The attempt was not very suc-
cessful, and the " Black-lists " of Tory loyalists in Maryland 
and Pennsylvania are said to contain remarkably few Catholic 
names. The clergy showed unswerving fidelity to the revo-
lution, the German priests, as well as those who were born 
in America, and even the small number of British birth who 
might easily have left the country by entering the English 
lines, clung to the cause of the colonists. Indeed, the United 
States owed the possession of the Far West in great measure 
to the good offices of a Catholic priest. The vast territory 
north-west of the Ohio, which was known as the Illinois 
country, was by the Quebec Act part of Canada. England 
had never recognized, nor did the Continental Congress 
recognize, the claims of any of the States to it, and it was 
reduced to the authority of the republic chiefly by the influence 
of Father Gibault, who had worked among the Indians for 
a dozen years, and who, strange to say, was a French Cana-
dian by birth. 

By this time the first official recognition of the Catholic 
Church had been made by the American government. In 
July 1779 the French envoy, M. Gerard, issued an invitation 
to the president and members of the Continental Congress 
sitting at Philadelphia, as follows : " Monsieur, vous êtes prié 
de la part du ministre plénipotentiaire de France, d'assister 
au Te Deum qu'il fera chanter dimanche 4 de ce mois à midi 
dans la chapelle catholique neuve pour célébrer l'anniversaire 
de l'Indépendance des Etats-Unis de l'Amérique." Two 
years later the same minister invited Congress, the Supreme 
Executive Council, and the Assembly of Pennsylvania to 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 56 
hear another sermon from his chaplain, Père Séraphin Bau-
dol, who had preached on the former occasion, in thanksgiv-
ing for the surrender of Lord Cornwallis to the combined 
armies of the United States and France at Yorktown. 

The close of the war marks an important period in the his-
tory of the Church in the United States. The old vicar-
apostolic of the London district had died early in 1781, and 
his successor, Monsignor Talbot, was evidently, in spite of 
penal laws, first an Englishman and then a Catholic, as he 
declined all intercourse with a country which he considered in 
a state of rebellion, and declared he would exercise no juris-
diction in it. The clergy in Maryland and Pennsylvania, 
who for the most part had been members of the recently sup-
pressed Society of Jesus, had much diffidence in approaching 
the Holy See. At last, after the peace, Father Carroll and 
four of his colleagues, representing different districts, mèt at 
Whitemarsh and drew-up a petition in the name of the "mis-
sionary priests residing in the thirteen United States of 
America," praying the sovereign pontiff to confirm as superior 
the vicar-general, who had been appointed by Bishop Chal-
loner, with powers to administer the sacrament of confirma-
tion and to perform other essential functions. Dr. Carroll's 
letter to the Propaganda, which accompanied the memorial, 
was the first of the series of statesmanlike documents which 
the leaders of the Church in America have from time to time 
addressed to the Vatican. " You are not ignorant," he writes, 
" that in these United States our religious system has under-
gone a revolution, if possible, more extraordinary than our 
political one," and he sets forth with great skill how along 
with toleration of all Christian creeds there exists a strong 
jealousy of any semblance of foreign jurisdiction. While 
Father Carroll was pleading that the Church in America 
must be administered locally by Americans, his friend, Ben-
jamin Franklin, the envoy of the republic at Versailles, was 
intriguing with the Nuncio for its subjection to the Gallican 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 57 
Church by the appointment of a superior nominated by the 
court of France, but his diplomacy was disavowed by Con-
gress, and the Church in America just escaped being involved 
in the disaster of the French Revolution. Finally, in June 
1784, Father Carroll was appointed prefect-apostolic in the 
United States, the name attached to the seal of the decree 
being one which in another person has been distinguished in 
our generation, Cardinal Antonelli. Thus was established in 
national independence the American branch of the Catholic 
Church, but, though a term was put to English jurisdiction, 
it should be noted that the far north and north-west still 
remained within the diocese of Quebec, and the American 
territory near Louisiana, which was now Spanish, was admin-
istered by the Bishop of Santiago de Cuba. 

Dr. Carroll's utterances from the first days of the organiza-
tion of the Church struck a keynote of liberality and fearless-
ness which is still heard in the voices of his successors. In 
his controversy with one Wharton, formerly a Jesuit of Mary-
land, he declares that " it never was our doctrine that salva-
tion can be obtained only by those actually in the communion 
of the Church," and in a letter to an Irish Capuchin in con-
nection with the controversy he writes with remarkable bold-
ness upon the' character of the late Pope Clement X I Y . : 
" Y o u think I was mistaken in attributing to him a time-
serving policy. . . . May God have mercy on his soul! 
but whatever allowance charity may wish for him, the pen of 
impartial history will not join you in attributing to his public 
conduct the virtue of benevolence;" and he adds that from 
his personal observation in Rome he considers that the Holy 
Father's behavior to the Jesuits was irreconcilable even with 
common humanity and the plainest principles of justice." 
Again, he expresses a wish that the liturgy might be said in 
English for the benefit of the poor people and negroes unable 
to read. Be it remembered that these were not the experi-
ences of an ambitious separatist about to lead a schism, but 
were the sentiments of the devoted priest whose recent 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 58 
appointment as superior of the church in his native land was 
the first of the series of marks of supreme confidence conferred 
upon him by the Holy See. 

The Prefect-Apostolic was not satisfied with his position of 
dependence on the Propaganda. " We form," he writes, " not 
a fluctuating body of laborers in Christ's vineyard, but a per-
manent body of national clergy." He tells Cardinal Antonelli 
that the American people will not endure the interference of 
any foreign potentate, and that the Catholics must be permit-
ted to nominate their own superior, subject of course to the 
pleasure of the Holy See. His " Relation on the State of 
Religion in the United States," which he drew up for the 
information of the Propaganda, is a most interesting docu-
ment. Maryland contained about 16,000 Catholics (of whom 
3,000 were slaves, " of African origin, called negroes") j 
Pennsylvania about 7,000 nearly all white. In Maryland, 
the heads of Catholic families were for the most part planters; 
in the neighboring State they were nearly all farmers except 
the merchants and mechanics living in Philadelphia. In the 
other English-speaking localities the Catholics were scattered 
and destitute of all religious ministry, except in the State of 
New York, where there were about 1,500 of them. The city 
of New York was in reality then, what it now unduly 
assumes to be, the capital of the United States. I t was the 
seat of Congress and the residence of the foreign envoys. 
The first Catholic church in New York was built by the 
instrumentality of the French Cónsul-General, De Crévecceur, 
and the Spanish minister obtained leave to build a legation 
chapel, the chaplain of which, Father O'Connell, from the 
Dominican Hospital at Bilboa, was probably the first Irish 
priest to settle in the United States. 

We must pass over the incidents attending Dr. Carroll's, 
first ministry at Baltimore, the jealousies of the old members 
of the Jesuit order, the attempts to colonize the West, and the 
effects of immigration after the peace, which brought in large 
numbers of German Catholics. The letters of the Prefect-



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 59 
Apostolic supply a vivid record of life in the early days of the 
young nation. The hardships of the clergy were severe, their 
isolation was intense; how modest their stipends may be 
judged from that of their Superior, who received £210 a year. 
One privation of the priests, however, which Dr. Carroll 
describes to Archbishop Troy of Dublin in an appeal for 
laborers, would not, it is to be feared, move to pity the heart 
of the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster of the present day. 
" Hardships of every kind," he says, " and particularly great 
scarcity of wine, must be borne with. Sobriety in drink is 
expected from clergymen to a great degree. That which in 
Europe would be esteemed no more than a cheerful enjoyment 
of a friendly company would be regarded here in our clergy as 
an unbecoming excess." 

It became more and more evident that the appointment of 
a bishop was of absolute necessity. Refractory priests, men 
of indocile mind who chafe under ecclesiastical discipline, took 
advantage of the fact that the Superior was a missionary func-
tionary, subject to the Propaganda at Rome, and appealed to 
the new-born patriotism of Americans, which was all-jealous 
of foreign jurisdiction. Once again Father Carroll petitioned 
the Holy Father, who in 1788 gave directions for the election 
of a bishop by the priesthood. The choice fell on the Prefect-
Apostolic, with only one dissentient voice; and, in November, 
1789, Pius V I . issued under the seal of the Fisher's ring the 
Bull erecting the See of Baltimore, the centenary of which 
decree was the occasion of the great celebration last winter. 

Once more John Carroll crossed the Atlantic, and in the 
summer of 1790, at the hands of the venerable Bishop 
Walmesley, the Vicar Apostolic of England, he received epis-
copal consecration in the chapel of Lulworth Castle, when the 
book of the Gospels was held over his shoulders by the son of 
his host, who was later to be known as Cardinal Weld. I t 
was right and fitting that the great English-speaking branch 
of the Catholic Church should in the day of small things be 
given its apostolic succession in its mother land. Spain, whose 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 60 
explorers first set up on American soil the emblem of the 
Church's faith, might have obtained this honor, since it was by 
the hands of the Spanish envoy that the decisive petition to 
the Holy See was conveyed. France, whose missionaries had 
planted the Catholic religion throughout the continent, from 
the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi, had, as we had seen, aided 
the recognition of the Church by the newly born nation, but 
in the year of grace 1790 France was amply occupied with 
her domestic concerns. Just at the moment when thq desig-
nate father of the American episcopate was being welcomed 
beneath the hospitable Dorsetshire roof-tree, Lafayette, who 
had no little share in the events of which this was the con-
summation, was likewise engaged in ecclesiastical ceremonial. 
Over in Paris an altar had been reared in the Champ de Mars 
on the anniversary of the capture of the Bastille, and there the 
hero of Yorktown waved hjs sword while Louis Seize swore 
fealty to the revolutionary constitution, after mass said, for the 
last time in his chequered career, by Charles Maurice de Tal-
leyrand, Bishop of Autun. It was better that the ordering of 
America's first prelate should be in the quiet retreat of an 
English manor, though it is strange that the democratic Cath-
olicism of the United States should have received its episcopal 
seal in a home of that English Catholic gentry which was even 
then willing to suffer and to sacrifice for a lost cause of abso-
lutism. 

We have described with some detail the circumstances of 
the foundation of the hierarchy because it was the turning 
point of the destiny of Roman Catholicism in the United 
States. Had the Church in America not been established upon 
a local basis, had it remained as a missionary organization 
administered by a camarilla of foreigners in Italy, not only 
would it never have approached its present position of power, 
but it would have always been regarded as an alien institution, 
and the millions of Catholic immigrants who have peopled 
and fertilized the continent could never have been assimilated 
with the nation. From the consecration of the first bishop 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 61 
onward the history of the Church in America is the history of 
the American people, and a mere sketch of the records of any 
one of the greater dioceses would fill a volume. We must, 
therefore, content ourselves with a rapid view of the vicis-
situdes and progress of the Church in the century which has 
followed the first investment of an American citizen with the 
episcopal purple. 

The year 1790, which had begun with a public acknowl-
edgment by General Washington of the patriotic part which 
the Catholics had taken in the accomplishment of the Revolu-
tion, ended with an exhortation by the bishop on his home-
coming to his people " to preserve in their hearts a warm 
charity and forbearance toward every other denomination of 
Christians." The next year the Holy See put the whole of 
the United States, including all the French and Spanish set-
tlements in the West, under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of 
Baltimore, and now succeeded a period of difficulty. The 
Catholic Church in America was, and still is, as heterogeneous 
in its composition as the American nation, and had it not in 
the early days of the republic been guided and governed by 
patriotic leaders, both the Church and the nation might have 
split up into communities as separate and unsympathetic as 
are the populations of Quebec and Ontario. There were 
French priests exiled by the Revolution (Chateaubriand came 
over with one shipload of them), who brought with them the 
reactionary traditions of the ancient regime, and looked with 
longing eyes to the ecclesiastical system in Canada; there was 
a growing German population in several States who declared 
that Bishop Carroll's jurisdiction did not extend to their na-
tionality. The bishop was both firm and conciliatory. He 
nominated a German as his coadjutor, who did not, however, 
live to be consecrated, but he brought the separatists to com-
plete submission, and before the end of the century the Court 
of Common Pleas of Pennsylvania in a leading case, gave a 
civil sanction to his authority. 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 64 
The new century opened with the first episcopal consecra-

tion in the United States, when Dr. Leonard Neale, a Mary-
lander, descended from a maid of honor of the queen who 
gave her name to his native State, was made coadjutor to the 
Bishop of Baltimore. Three years later, in the same pro-
cathedral, Bishop Carroll officiated at another interesting cere-
mony, when he "joined in holy matrimony Jerome Bonaparte, 
brother of the First Consul of France, and Elizabeth Patter-
son, daughter of William Patterson, Esq., of the city of Bal-
timore." One of the best-known inhabitants of the Monu-
mental City to-day is a grandson of the King of Westphalia 
by this marriage, and an inheritor of the unmistakable Na-
poleonic cast of features. The First Consul liad already that 
year taken a step of great moment to the Catholic Church 
in America when, on the retrocession of Louisiana by Spain 
to France, he had forthwith transferred that territory to 
the United States. This accession to his jurisdiction was 
an additional motive for the bishop to urge the Holy See 
to create new dioceses. Pius V I I . had consulted an Amer-
ican priest upon Bishop Carroll's projects when he went 
to Paris to crown Miss Patterson's brother-in-law, but it was 
not till 1808 that Bulls were issued for the erection of the 
sees of New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Bardstown, 
which last see included Kentucky, Tennessee, and the north-
west region. The nominees for Boston and Bardstown were 
Frenchmen, and for the other two dioceses Irishmen. All of 
them were consecrated at Baltimore except the Bishop of New 
York, but Father Concanen, the Dominican priest designated 
for that see, received his episcopal orders at Rome, where he 
resided. He however died in 1810 at Naples, where he had 
been delayed by the blockade of the Mediterranean ports. 
He was to have been the bearer of the archiepiscopal pallium 
to Dr. Carroll, who had now been named metropolitan of the 
United States, and it was eventually brought" to Baltimore by 
the British minister a few mouths before Congress declared 
war against Great Britain. 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 63 
The last days of the aged archbishop were full of anxiety. 

The British fleet was in Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac j 
Washington was burnt, and Baltimore, where the first Amer-
ican Cathedral was rising, was invested by the English troops 
and the Holy See chose this moment for imposing upon the 
See of New York a subject of George I I I . The venerable 
father of the hierarchy was, however, contented in the knowl-
edge that the difficulties of the Church in his native land were 
due only to its flourishing increase, and a bishop was given to 
Louisiana almost at the moment of the battle of New Orleans. 
The last year of John Carroll's life was cheered by the resto-
ration by the Pope of his beloved Jesuit order, which he had 
entered more than sixty years before, at a time when the pros-
pects of Catholicism in the British settlements seemed well-
nigh hopeless. When be died, in 1815, the revolted colonies 
had become one of the great powers of the earth, and within 
the land, from Boston Bay to the Gulf of Mexico, the Catholic 
Church was a living and vigorous organization. Of the pa-
triarch of the American Church his illustrious successor in the 
See of Baltimore—Cardinal Gibbons—has well said that 

" He did not wish the Church to vegetate as a delicate exotic plant; he 
wished it to become a sturdy tree, deep rooted in the soil, to grow with the 
growth and bloom with the development of the country, inured to its cli-
mate, braving its storms and invigorated by them. Knowing as he did the 
mischief bred by national rivalries, his aim was that the clergy and people, 
no matter from what country they sprung, should be thoroughly identified 
with the land in which their lot is cast, that they should study its laws and 
political constitution, and be in harmony with its spirit; in a word, that 
they should become as soon as possible assimilated to the social body in all 
things appertaining to the domain of civil life." 

In no part of the United States has the growth of the Roman 
Catholic Church been so remarkable as in New England, 
where till after the Revolution lingered the spirit which in the 
previous century had applauded the Puritan Governor Endi-
cott, when he cut from the British flag the St. George's cross 
" as a Popish symbol savoring of superstition, and not to be 
countenanced by Christian men." The French alliance and 
other causes produced such a change in sentiment that when 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 64 
Bishop Carroll visited Boston in 1791 he was publicly and 
privately entertained by Protestant societies and individuals. 
Nevertheless at the end of the century, when President Adams 
was contributing to the building of the first Catholic church 
in New England, following Washington's example in Phila-
delphia, Boston contained only 210 Roman Catholics. At the 
present day there are 225,000 Catholics among the 400,000 
inhabitants of the Puritan capital. Yet this prodigious 
change is not more amazing than others in the United States 
which have been instrumental in causing the increase of the 
national population, and with it the growth of Catholicism. 
For example, a visitor to the Centennial Congress last Novem-
ber might have entered the cars at Baltimore any evening 
after dinner, and have heard mass in Boston Cathedral the 
next morning; whereas Bishop Carroll, writing from the for-
mer city in 1803, says that by starting thence at the beginning 
of September he hopes to reach Boston a few days before a 
ceremony fixed for Michaelmas. 

An ingenious American priest has suggested that the rise 
of Roman Catholicism in New England was the logical con-
sequence of the Revolution, inasmuch as the proclamation of 
man's natural rights involved the overthrow of the whole the-
ological structure which the reformed theologians built upon 
the corner stone of man's " total depravity;" the Puritans, 
therefore, in signing the Declaration of Independence, signed 
their own death warrant. The weak point in this philosophic 
theory is the fact that two generations passed away after the 
revolution before Roman Catholicism gained an extensive 
domain in Puritan territory. As late as 1822 Mr. Jefferson 
wrote: " I trust there is not a young man now born in the 
United States who will not die a Unitarian and it is an in-
teresting study, though this is not the place for it, to trace 
how the stern faith of the Pilgrim Fathers gave way to the 
cultured Arianism of Massachusetts, which, after a long reign 
among the most highly educated community in America, is in 
turn being dethroned by less barren creeds. The early devel-



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 65 
opment of the Catholic Church in New England must be 
ascribed to the more practical cause of immigration, though it 
is true that the founder of Roman Catholicism in New Eng-
land was a Congregational minister who became a Catholic 
priest just a hundred years ago. Father Thayer never attained 
to the episcopate, and the first bishop of Boston was Dr. Cheve-
rus, who so slightly divested himself of his own nationality 
that he finally died Cardinal Archbishop of Bordeaux. 

In 1820 the Roman Catholics in the United States num-
bered about 300,000 which is now the Catholic population of 
at least three cities in the Union. In ten years from 1810 
they had doubled, the general peace in Europe having stimu-
lated immigration, and they were now about one-thirtieth of 
the whole nation. From that time onwards the history of 
the Church in America is a record of swift and steady pro-
gress, and, though the results are of stupendous importance to 
the world and to Christendom, the details of the story are per-
haps of local rather than of general interest. New sees were 
erected, provinces created, councils and synods summoned, 
seminaries founded, and religious orders established, so that as 
the stream of immigration increased, and the growing popula-
tion opened up the vast continent, the rfteeds of the newcomers 
were provided for. The record is not always one of peace; 
lawless demonstration is a frequent incident in the life of 
young communities, and half a century ago was the centre of 
a period during which the rising strength of Roman Catholi-
cism provoked violent opposition in certain cities, notably 
Philadelphia and Boston, when convents were stormed and 
churches burnt, not without bloodshed. Nor was the Church 
always free from domestic dissension; a new population in the 
sudden enjoyment of republican freedom would naturally chafe 
against all discipline, and priests as well as people sometimes 
for a season displayed impatience of authority, but no success-
ful schism was ever accomplished. 

I t would be impossible here to commemorate even by name 
all the fathers of the American Church who carried on the 

5 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 66 
tradition left them by Archbishop Carroll. There was Bishop 
England, the first Bishop of Charleston, who from the outset 
of his labors in the Slave States was marked as the ablest pre-
late of his day, and is still remembered as " the light of the 
American hierarchy." There was Bishop Dubois, the third 
incumbent of the see of New York, who, strangely enough, 
was a schoolfellow of Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, a 
brave old Frenchman who, waging war against the trustee 
system in the administration of the churches, was threatened 
at the age of eighty with the loss of his stipend, and replied, 
" Gentlemen, you may vote me a salary or not; I need little; 
I can live in a basement or a garret, but whether I come up 
from my basement or down from my garret, I shall still be 
your bishop." Dr. Hughes, his successor, was the first Arch-
bishop of New York, and was such a conspicuous figure in 
American public life that, prior to the war with Mexico, the 
Cabinet at Washington urged him to accept the post of min-
ister to that country, and towards the end of his life he 
accepted a temporary mission to France during the War of 
Secession. I t was his successor, Archbishop McCloskey, who 
was the first American citizen to be invested with a cardinal's 
hat. Then there wis Archbishop Kenrick, the sixth in the 
see of Baltimore, whose finished scholarship did not make him 
the less efficient to rule the diocese of Philadelphia before his 
elevation to the primacy in the troublous period we have men-
tioned. The funeral of his predecessor—Archbishop Eccle-
ston—was followed by the President of the United States and 
his Cabinet, at the very time when the Prime Minister of 
England—Lord John Russell—was passing his Papa! Aggres-
sion Bill. One word of mention should be made of John 
Fitzpatrick, the young New Englander, who was consecrated 
a boy-bishop, and who, not long before his premature death, 
when the news cataetjf the firing on Fort Sumter, was the first 
of the Boston clergy to order that all the churches should be kept 
open for prayers for the Union. The civil war was a trying 
experience for the Catholic Church, but though " Maryland, 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 67 

my Maryland!" was the rallying cry of the South, and 
though Catholic and Protestant on either side of Mason and 
Dixon's line forgot all the distinction of creed fighting for 
the North or for the South, the integrity of the Church was 
never harmed, and, the year after the peace, Archbishop 
Spalding presided over the Second Plenary Council of Balti-
more, which was said to have been the largest synodical gath-
ering since the Council of Trent. 

The history of Catholicism in the United States during the 
last two generations is most effectively expressed in figures. 
I n 1830 there were nearly half a million Catholics in a popu-
lation of thirteen millions. By 1840 their numbers had 
doubled, while the population had increased only to seventeen 
millions, the proportion of Roman Catholics to the entire pop-
ulation having risen from A to TV- Before the next decade 
closed the Irish famine had occurred, which was the chief 

X cause of the enormous accession of two millions of Roman 
Catholic inhabitants, and the three million American adher-
ents of the Church in 1850 constituted one-eighth of the 
total population. During those ten years the immigration to 
the United States was composed annually of about 200,000 
Irish and about 80,000 Germans; but in the next decade a 
change took place, and accordingly in 1854 we find that 220,-
000 Germans landed in America and only 101,000 Irish. 
The proportion of Catholics among the Irish immigrants is 
seven-eighths; their proportion among the Germans depends on 
the provinces from which in a given year the immigrants 
come, and varies from one-fifth to one-half of the total num-
ber. The Catholic population never lost ground, and now, in 
1890, the lowest estimate of its numbers is 9,000,000, the 
highest estimate 12,000,000, in a total population of nearly 
65,000,000. The next census of the United States will 
determine all conjectures, but meanwhile it is safe to consider 
that the Roman Catholics number one-sixth of the inhabitants 
of the republic. 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 68 
This enormous growth of the Catholic population in 

America is not exclusively due to immigration. Other causes 
of the increase are the annexation of territories, such as Flor-
ida, Texas and California, the scattered inhabitants of which 
were for the most part Catholic; conversions; and the multi-
plying of families. The last of these alone is numerically of 
importance. A considerable number of Protestants of influ-
ence have become Catholics, and no less than three archbish-
ops and seven bishops of the American hierarchy in the last 
fifty years were born in other creeds; moreover, in the days 
when the echo of the Oxford movement was borne across the 
Atlantic there occurred the strange case of an Anglican 
prelate, Bishop Ives, of North Carolina, divesting himself of 
his episcopal office and becoming a layman in the Church of 
Rome. I t is, however, certain that the defections of immi-
grants have been overwhelmingly more numerous than the 
conversions. For example, at the end of the decade in which 
we have seen that two millions of Irish people landed in 
America, the increase of Roman Catholics in the country 
amounted to about two millions. I t must be remembered 
that during that period there was also a large immigration of 
German Catholics, and, moreover, a large family increase both 
among the immigrants and the Catholic population already in 
the country. I t is impossible to calculate the number of those 
who fell away from the Church in the period, but they prob-
ably amounted to at least a million. Admirable as the 
organization of the Roman Catholic Church is, the sudden 
accession to the American nation after the famine in Ireland 
and the revolution in Germany could not have been foreseen, 
and the Church in the United States doubtless lost many of 
her children, not from any defect in her marvellous machinery 
but from a lack of laborers needed at a time of high pressure. 
I t requires all the resources of the most energetic branch of 
the most active organization in the world to maintain a con-
dition of preparedness for the incessant growth of the Cath-
olic population. "Messis vuidem multa, operarii autem 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 69 
pauci" is a complaint often uttered by the fathers of the Amer-
ican Church. Yet the thirty missioners of 1790 have now as 
successors more than 8,000 priests, working under the direc-
tion of fourteen archbishops and seventy-three suffragans, 
while, to the end that the new generation may be served by a 
national priesthood less dependent than heretofore on alien aid, 
there are over 2,000 seminarists of the youth of America 
training for holy orders in the Church. 

The priesthood in the United States is at present drawn 
from every nation of Europe, not only because the immigrant 
flocks in the first days in a strange land need pastors of their 
own race, but also for the reason that, in a country where 
material prosperity is held to be the chief aim of life, popular 
sentiment gives little encouragement to the following of unlu-
crative professions, whether clerical or secular. A growing 
proportion of the clergy is, however, of American birth, and the 
national feeling, which we found in the earliest days of the com-
monwealth jealous of all foreign interference in-the affairs of 
the Church, will in time establish an almost exclusively home-
born priesthood. This same patriotic sentiment, which is 
the most striking and the most potent characteristic in the 
American nation, has for years been swiftly assimilating the 
myriad hordes of immigrants which have peopled the conti-
nent. Much is now heard of the Irish vote, and of the gross 
offenses and servile acts which each of the political parties in 
the Republic is willing to commit to purchase its favor; much 
is said of the wonderful phenomenon now presented in the 
United States, where New York and Chicago rank after 
Berlin as the most populous German cities in the world. 
Fifty years hence there will be no Irish vote to reckon with, 
and the chief trace of the Germans in the great commercial 
centres, will be found in the patronymics of the inhabitants. 
The American nation will have become so vast that the immi-
grant stream, however strong, will be overwhelmed in i t ; 
and New York, with its half German population and its 
wholly Irish administrations, men now born may live to see 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 70 
an American city. Considering the relative numbers of the 
newcomers and of the earlier settlers, the progress of the pro-
cess of assimilation has been amazing. I t was for this reason 
that at the outset we emphasized the importance of the 
immigration which was on the eve of taking place fifty years 
ago. The immigrants of that period were often peasants, 
poor, ignorant and superstitious; their descendants are citizens 
of the most intelligent of modern nations, whose tendencies are 
sceptical rather than credulous ; they are members of a com-
munity in which poverty has no place, save in the cities where 
strangers congregate. The chief result, then, of the influx 
and increase of Catholic population in the United States 
is that for the first time in the history of Christendom we find 
the Roman Catholic religion professed by a great democracy, 
speaking the dominant language of the earth, inhabiting a 
continent of boundless resources, forming a powerful section 
of the foremost in prosperity among the nations. In past 
ages, no doubt, it is true, that entire peoples adhered to the 
Catholic faith, but the most favorable example in history can-
not be compared with the free and enlightened democracy of 
America, and in vain in the present day do we look on the 
Continent of Europe for any such alliance between the Church 
and the people. 

If the fathers of the hierarchy were men prone to reaction 
and timorous, the branch of the Church they govern would 
be a select and attenuated body, and Roman Catholicism in 
the United States would be a subject of no greater importance 
to the world at large than that of clericalism in Belgium. 
But the Church in America is happy in having at its head a 
great statesman. Cardinal Gibbons's achievement at the 
Vatican, when, the youngest member of the Sacred College, 
he induced the Holy See to go back upon its decision con-
demning the Knights of Labor, is well known in this country. 
The aphorism of Cardinal Manning which he quoted to the 
Sacred Congregation, to the effect that in the future era the 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 71 
Church will have to deal, not with potentates, but with peo-
ples, is the keynote of his own public policy. 

We have before us two works from the pen of the Cardinal-
Archbishop of Baltimore. The brief quotations we have 
already made from " Faith of Our Fathers " are typical of the 
spirit of liberality which characterizes all the acts and utter-
ances of this eminent Churchman. The book is an exposition 
of Catholic doctrine, but the generous and even affectionate 
tone assumed towards Christians outside the Church is very 
remarkable in a dogmatic treatise. The only serious flaw we 
have found in the book is one which is probably the result of 
its extraordinary popularity, and has been overlooked in the 
rapidity with which new editions have been issued. The copy 
before us, published in 1887, is of the 155th thousand, and the 
200th thousand has, we believe, been called for. The section 
to which we take exception is " On the Relative Morality of 
Catholic and Protestant Countries," and was evidently written 
in reply to some intemperate Protestant controversialist whose 
arguments do not deserve the perpetuation which the Cardinal 
gives to them. We will only say that, even if criminal 
statistics of 1864 had any pertinence to-day, Cardinal Gibbons 
is the last prelate in Christendom to hold up to his people the 
condition of France under the Second Empire' as a favorable 
example in morals. 

In this persuasive manual, which is described as " a plain 
exposition and vindication of the Church founded by our 
Lord Jesus Christ," there is no mention of the cognate sub-
jects of relics and modern miracles, though the book is 
exhaustive in other respects. The silence is significant. We 
know not what is the personal belief of the Archbishop of Bal-
timore in this respect, but we do know that he is alive to the 
fact that what might be an aid to faith of the women of one 
country, or of the peasantry of another, might prove to be a 
stumbling-block to the practical people of America with their 
rational -tendency of mind. Cardinal Gibbons is a not 
unworthy follower of the opportunist apostle who wrote to 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 72 
the Roman colonists on the Gulf of Corinth, " Omnia mihi 
licent, sed non omnia expediunt." 

The other volume is one of the most striking books ever 
written by a high dignitary of the Church of Rome. " Our 
Christian Heritage," which is dedicated to the memory of 
John Carroll, on the hundredth anniversary of the foundation 
of the hierarchy, is not a polemical work: 

" It does not aim at vindicating the claims of the Catholic Church as 
superior to those of the separated branches of Christianity. . . . It has 
nothing to say against any Christian denomination that still retains faith 
in at least the divine mission of Jesus Christ. On the contrary, I am glad 
to acknowledge that most of the topics discussed have often found, and still 
find, able and zealous advocates in Protestant writers, and, far from despis-
ing or rejecting their support, I would gladly hold out to them the right 
hand of fellowship so long as they unite with us in striking the common 
foe." 

The little volume which opens with these words of charity 
is an apology for what in England is sometimes called " evan-
gelical Christianity." From cover to cover it does not contain 
six pages which would not be endorsed by any Protestant 
divine, from the right reverend bench in the House of Lords 
to the pastors of the Reformed Church in France; indeed, the 
passage in the book to which a French Protestant would take 
most exception is one where the Cardinal, who was in Paris 
when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, on his way home we 
believe from the Vatican Council, favorably compares the 
behavior of the German Lutheran troops with that of the 
nominally Catholic French army : 

" The German Emperor on the contrary, was accustomed to invoke the 
aid of Heaven on the eve of an engagement, and to thank God for victories 
won. On the evening before the battle of Sedan the chant that filled the 
air from every German camp was not the song of ribaldry, but the glorious 
hymn, ' Nun danket alle Gott.'" 

We have quoted these passages not because they are the 
most admirable in the volume, or the most valuable, but as 
showing that the sentiment cherished for his fellow Christians 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 73 
by the powerful head of the Roman Church in America is not 
a feeling of charitable condescension, but a spirit of perfect 
brotherhood. The chapters are enriched with illustrations 
from profane writers of unimpeachable Protestantism from 
Lucretius to Mr. Lecky, and the chief outward sign that the 
book is the work of a Catholic is the unfamiliar spelling of the 
names of Scripture characters according to the Douay version, 
Pharao and Josue, Achab and Ezechias. The Cardinal takes 
exception to the action of certain denominations in Baltimore 
which have moved the Mayor to suppress an " anti-Christian 
Sunday School," on the ground that coercion in religious mat-
ters is in itself anti-Christian, and moreover, impolitic. He 
denounces monopolies with the same fearless hand which 
penned the famous memorial to Cardinal Simeoni on the labor 
question, though the monopolist to-day is as potent a person-
age in American society as was the slaveholder in the South 
before the war; and he attacks unsparingly " the gross ana 
systematic election frauds;" he naturally criticises the secu-
lar school-system ; and he deplores the laxity of the marriage 
laws. Nevertheless, he takes no pessimist view of the future 
of his country, for he recounts with pride that every early set-
tlement in America was made by some Christian community, 
Puritan or Quaker, Anglican or Presbyterian, Huguenot or 
Catholic; and in a strain of lofty patriotism he declares his 
hope in the destiny of the nation because from its birth it has 
never ceased to recognize religion as the basis of society. 

If Cardinal Gibbons stood alone in the American hierarchy 
in his liberal and far-seeing opportunism; if his sagacious 
recognition of modern tendencies were as far in advance of 
the sentiments of his American co-religionists as Cardinal 
Manning's intellectual capacity is superior to that of the Eng-
lish Catholic laity, even then the influence of his words and 
works would be great, inasmuch as he is a renowned citizen 
of the United States, of whom all his countrymen are proud, 
and moreover, a prince of the Church upon whom the Holy 
See has not only conferred its highest gift, but has also lis-



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 74 
tened to his counsel in manner unprecedented. But the Car-
dinal, in his fearless independence, is a faithful spokesman of 
the millions of his fellow-citizens, who in matters of faith 
regard him as their national chief, though the immigrant 
priests and people sometimes lag behind their bold leader. 
The handsome volume which commemorates the proceedings 
of the Catholic Congress last November, in celebration of the 
centenary of the hierarchy, is filled mainly with the sermons 
and addresses of bishops and laymen assembled at Baltimore 
and Washington on that occasion. The festival was one of 
such pomp and magnitude that it would not have been sur-
prising if in the great gathering of Catholics from all corners 
of the Union there had been uttered words of defiance or of 
self-satisfied exclusiveness, but we have sought in vain for 
any utterance which might even wound the feelings of Pro-
testant America. On the contrary, though no expression was 
wanting of devotion to the Church and of pride in its pro-
gress in the land, of which the imposing assembly was a sym-
bol, throughout the orations and discourses there rang clear 
above all other sounds the note of ardent love of country. 
This is the secret of the strength of Catholicism in the United 
States. 

Cardinal Gibbons does not stand alone among his brethren 
of the episcopate in carrying on the tradition of Archbishop 
Carroll. Among the fathers of the Church who rallied round 
their head when he went forth three years ago to instruct the 
Sacred Congregation in American economics there are some 
who are as eloquent in their patriotism aa he. Of all the 
utterances recorded in the commemoration volume of the cen-
tenary nothing approaches in power and boldness the sermon 
preached in Baltimore Cathedral by Archbishop Ireland of 
St. Paul, Minnesota. A few of his sentences, transcribed 
without commentary, will give a better idea of the mission 
and destiny of the Catholic Church in the United States than 
many pages of dissertation :— 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 75 
" The watchwords of the age are reason, education, liberty, the material 

improvement of the masses. Nor are these watchwords empty sounds-
They represent solid realities, for which the age deserves praise. . . . 
Despite its defects and mistakes I love my age. I love-its aspirations and 
its resolves. I revel in its feats of valor, its industries and its discoveries. 
I thank it for its many benefactions to my fellowmen, to the people rather 
than princes and rulers. I seek no backward voyage across the sea of time-
I will even press forward. . . . In our American parlance, let us go ahead. 
What if we do at times blunder ? If we never venture we shall never gain. 
The conservatism which is resolved to be ever safe is dry-rot. 

" Do not fear the novel, provided principles are well guarded. It ia a 
time of novelties—and religious action, to accord with the age, must take 
new forms and new directions. Let there be individual action. Laymen 
need not wait for priest, nor priest for bishop, nor bishop for Pope. The 
timid move in crowds, the brave in single file. When combined efforts are 
called for, be ready, and at all times be prompt to obey when orders are 
given; but with all this there is vast room for individual action, and vast 
good to be done by it. 

" We should live in our age, know it, be in touch with it. There are 
Catholics more numerous, however, in Europe than in America, to whom 
the present will not be known until long after it shall have become the 
past. Our work is in the present, and not in the past. It will not do to 
understand the thirteenth better than the nineteenth century; to be more 
conversant with the errors of Arius or Eutyches than with those of con-
temporary infidels or agnostics; to study more deeply the causes of Albi-
gensian or Lutheran heresies, or the French Revolution, than the causes of 
the social upheavals of our own times. The world has entered into an 
entirely new phase; the past will not return; reaction is the dream of men 
who see not, and hear not; who sit at the gates of cemeteries weeping over 
tombs that shall not be reopened, in utter oblivion of the living world back 
of them. We should speak to our age of things it feels and in language it 
understands. We should be in it, and of it, if we would have its ear. 

" For the same reason there is needed a thorough sympathy with the 
country. The Church of America must be, of course, as Catholic as ever in 
Jerusalem or Rome; but so far as her garments assume color from the local 
atmosphere she must be American. Let no one dare paint her brow with 
foreign tint, or pin to her mantle foreign linings. There is danger; we 
receive large accessions of Catholics from foreign countries. God witnesses 
it they are welcome. I will not intrude on their personal affections and 
tastes; but those, if foreign, they shall not incrust upon the Church. 
Americans have no longing for a Church with foreign aspect; it would 
wield no influence over them. In no manner could it prosper; exotics have 
never but sickly forms. 

"The strength of the Church to-day in all countries particularly in 
America, is the people. This is essentially the age of democracy. The days 



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 76 
of princes and of feudal lords are gone; monarcks hold their thrones to 
execute the will of the people. Woe to religion where this fact is not 
understood! H e who holds the masses, reigns. The masses are held by 
their intellect and their heart. No power controls them save that which 
touches their own free souls. We have a dreadful lesson to learn from cer-
tain European countries, in which, from weight of tradition, the Church 
clings to thrones and classes, and loses her grasp upon the people. Let us 
not make this mistake. We have here no princes, no hereditary classes. 
Still there is the danger that there be in religion a favored aristocracy, upon 
whom we lavish so much care that none remains for others. . . . The time 
has come for 'salvation armies' to penetrate the wildest thicket of thorns 
and briars, and bring God's word to the ear of the most vile, the most 
ignorant, and the most godless. Saving those who insist on being saved, as 
we are satisfied in doing, is not the mission of the Church. ' Compel them 
to come i n ' is the command of the Master. This is not the religion we 
need to-day—to sing lovely anthems in cathedral stalls, and wear copes of 
broidered gold, while no multitude throng nave or aisle, and the world out-
side is dying of spiritual and moral starvation. Seek out men; speak to 
them not in stilted phrase or seventeenth-century sermon style, but in burn-
ing words that go to their hearts as well as their minds." 

With no words better than these can we conclude. They 
are the words of no visionary optimist, but of a leader looked 
up to by millions of the most intelligent and most prosperous 
nation in the world. The English-speaking race is fated to 
dominate the earth, and for the first period of its domination 
the American people are bound to take the foremost place. 
Supposing that the Catholic Church only retains its present 
proportion of the inhabitants of the United States, even then, 
before the coming century has grown old, the American Cath-
olics will probably number sixty millions, and there will be 
more Catholics in the world speaking the English tongue than 
any other language. We make no conjecture as to the form 
which the revolution in the economy of the Church will take. 
Events march so rapidly in this age that it would be futile to 
look forward even ten years ahead. We know not whether 
the dawn of a new century will break upon the chair of St. 
Peter still jealously surrounded by a band of Italian reaction-
aries ; we know not whether on the continent of Europe the 
name of Rome will still be associated with the policy of retro-



r The Catholic Democracy of America, 77 
gression; even the immediate future is obscure, and only of 
the incidence of the unexpected can we be absolutely certain. 
Still, so far as calculation can be based upon phenomena 
which the last half century has developed, it would not seem 
unduly rash to prophesy that the history of Christendom is 
about to be revolutionized by an alliance which has been con-
summated in the New World between the venerable Church 
in whose name it was first given to the Old, and the democracy 
of that mighty English race which wrested the American con-
tinent from its Catholic discoverers. 





O U R L A T E S T P U B L I C A T I O N S . 

K A T H L E E N MAV"OTTRN"EE3SJ". 
B y C L A R A M U L H O L L A N D . 

A T h r i l l i n g S t o r y o f Irish L i f e a n d A d v e n t u r e . 
1 Volume. 12mo. Cloth. Retail, $1. Net, 50 Cents. 

We recommend i t as a pure story, told by one whom God has gifted with all t h a t makes t h e I r i s h h e a r t lovely a n d lovable.—Michigan Catholic. The story is pleasantly told, and agreeable in t h e impression t h a t i t gives of t h e author's ability. Catholic- World. I t is a picture of Irish life of to-day, and t h e r e is a freshness and t r u t h about i t t h a t makes i t of intense interest.—Catholic Messenger1. 

H I S T O R Y OF T H E C A R M E L I T E N U N S . 
C A R M E L I N A M E R I C A . 

\1 Volume. Cloth. Octavo. Net, $3.50. 
I t is a most valuable addition t o our ecclesiastical history, written according to t r u e historic principles, con-taining nothing t h a t t h e most practiced historian would omit.—Catholic Standard. As a specimen of historical writing i t is exceptionally good.—Baltimore American. 
To t h e general reader t h e book will give considerable interest because of t h e number of beautiful personal histories i t contains.—Catholic Review. I t is a n extremely valuable addition to t h e historical literature of t h e Church.—Irish Monthly, Dublin. 

1791; A TALE OF SAN DOMINGO. 
A n A u t h e n t i c A c c o u n t of t h e U p r i s i n g o f t h e Negroes I n 1791 w h i c h destroyed t h e 

f a m o u s o l d F r e n c h Colony. 

B y E i W . G I L L I A M , M . E>. 
1 Volume. 12mo. Cloth. Net, $1. 

The study of t h e situation and a quiet but effective style makes " 1791V a story of more t h a n ordinary interest. 
Baltimore Sun. The material for t h i s most interesting story was gathered from facts connected with t h e slave insurrection on t h e island of San Domingo i n 1791.—Catholic Telegraph. The story is well written and of absorbing interest and should at once take a high r a n k i n Catholic literature. 

Catholic Standard. 

T H E L E T T E R S O E S E N E X 
On True and False Faith, and The Sabbath Question Scripturally Considered. 

1 Volume. 12mo. Paper. Net, 25 Cents. 

L E T T E R S O F S T . ATTGrTTSTITSTE. 
SELECTED A N D T R A N S L A T E D B Y 

M - A - R Y H , A L L I E S . 
1 Volume. 12mo. Cloth. Net, $1.75. 

_ The Letters are full of pathos and spirituality, and many of them dwell with most practical interest upon the, necessity of u n i t y in t h e Catholic religion. Miss Allies has done h e r own part of t h e work admirably. By her knowledge of the dead languages, by h e r learning, and by her generous work for religion, she reminds us of t h e society of devout and learned women who gathered around St. Jerome i n t h e fourth century.—London Tablet. 

T U B V I R T U E S OK M A R Y , 
B T 

F A T H E R F R A N C I S ARIAS, 
of t h e S o c i e t y of J e s u s . 

1 Volume. 18mo. Cloth. Net, 70 cents. 
J O H N M U R P H Y & CO., Publishers, Baltimore. 



STORIES OF T H E SEVEN SACRAMENTS 
BY 

LOUISA EMILY DOBREE 

) I 
C O N T E N T S 

B A P T I S M : B L A N C H E ' S B A P T I S M . — C O N F I R M A T I O N : T H E M A R K T H A T W A S N E V E R 
R U B B E D O U T . — H O L Y E U C H A R I S T : B R I A N D A L Y . — P E N A N C E : T E D ' S 

M E D A L . — E X T R E M E U N C T I O N : S Y L V I A ' S L E S S O N 
H O L Y O R D E R S : T H E T W O W I S H E S . — 

M A T R I M O N Y : R E G A I N E D . 

1 Volume. 12mo. Cloth, 40 cts. net. 

THE LIFE OF OUR. LIFE. 
T H E H A R M O N Y OF T H E G O S P E L . 

A r r a n g e d with I n t r o d u c t o r y and E x p l a n a t o r y C h a p t e r s , N o t e s a n d I n d i c e s 
B Y T H E 

Rev. H. J. COLERIDGE, S. J. 
2 Volumes. 12mo. Cloth. $3.50 net. 

t - I T H E 
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ, according to St. Matthew. 

T R A N S L A T E D F R O M T H E V U L G A T E W I T H N O T E S A N D R E F E R E N C E S . 
Cloth, 15 cents net. Paper, 10 cents net. 

SCIENCE AND S C I E N T I S T S . 
Some Papers on Natural History, by the Rev. JOHN GERARD, S. J . 

C o n t e n t s : — M r . G r a n t A l l e n ' s B o t a n i c a l F a b l e s — W h o P a i n t e d t h e F l o w e r s — S o m e W a y s i d e P r o b -
l e m s — B e h o l d t h e B i r d s of t h e A i r — H o w T h e o r i e s a r e M a n u f a c t u r e d — I n s t i n c t a n d i t s L e s s o n s . 

1 Volume. 12mo. Cloth, 40 cents net. 

Manual of the Arch-Confraternity of the Holy Face, 
Followed by the L-ittle Office of the Holy Name of God. 

B y t h e R e v . A b b e J a n v i e r , (,' 
Dean of the Metropolitan Chapter of Tours, Priest of the Holy Face. 

W i t h the approbation of Mgr. the most Eev. Archbishop of Tours. Liberal discount on quantities. 
1 Volume. 32mo. Cloth, 40 cents. 

JOHN M U R P H Y & CO., Publishers, Baltimore. 



Every Catholic should have a Copy. 
T H E N E W P R A Y E R B O O K 

Ordered by the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore. 
O F P R A Y E R S 

For the Us?ek of the Catholic Laity, 
P R E P A R E D A N D P U B L I S H E D B Y O R D E R O P 

THE THIRD PLENARY COUNCIL OF BALTIMORE. 
O u r e d i t i o n is a s h a p e l y 34111.0., s m a l l e r t h a n S t . V i n c e n t ' s M a n u a l 

b o u n d in c h e a p a n d a t t r a c t i v e s t y l e s . 
Printed on t h e finest p a p e r m a k i n g 7 9 2 pages, 2 4 m o . 

Cloth, beveled, sprinkled edges n ; Cloth, burnished red edges..! 1 ™ 
Cloth, gilt edges S M . . . . . Z ' . ! " " " . " " 1 75 French Calf, limp, round corners, gilt edges....— 2 00 F r e n c h Levant, limp, round corners, gilt edges _ 0 on 
French Morocco, stiff or flexible, gilt edges 2 50 German Turkey, limp, round corners, r t d and gold edges W g 50 German Calf, limp, round corners, red and gold edges 4 gjj 

N E W E D I T I O N . J U S T R E P R I N T E D . 
T H E M E T R O P O L I T A N E D I T I O N OF 

BUTLER'S LIVES OF THE SAINTS. 
T h e Lives of the Fathers*, Martyrs, and other Principal Saints; Compiled from Original 

Monuments and other Authentic Records, 
B y t h e R E V . A L B A N B U T L E R . 

Published with the approbation and recommendation of The Most Beverend Archbishop Kenrick. 
In 2 Volumes, Royal 8vo. Cloth ; $ 7 50 

Cloth, gilt edges 9 00 
Cloth 9 00 
Cloth, gilt edges 11 00 
Half Morocco 15 00 
Turkey, super extra 20 00 

F I R S T C O M M U N I O N . 
A Series of Beautiful and Interesting Letters to the Young. 

32mo. Cloth. Bed edges, 60 cents. 

THE HEART OF ST. GERTRUDE 
or, A Heart According to that of Jesus. 

From t h e F r e n c h of l e Pere I . J. M. CS0SS, S. J., by P. P. S. 
32mo. Cloth. Bed edges, 60 cents. 

N o t e s o n D o c t r i n a l a n d S p i r i t u a l S u b j e c t s . 
B y F r e d e r i c k W i l l i a m F a b e r , D. D, 

a . . I n two volumes. Volume 1.—Mysteries and Festivals. Volume 2.—The Faith and the Spiritual Life. Printed from clear type and uniform with Murphy's Complete Edition. 
2 Volumes. 12mo. Cloth, $3.00. 

JOHN M U R P H Y & CO., Publishers, Baltimore. 



FIFTH EDITION NOW R E A D Y ! 

S H O U L D B E I N E V E R Y L I B R A R Y . 

O J ^ R / I D I I L T ^ X J G I B B O N S ' 

OUR CHRISTIAN HERITAGE. 
I Volume. l2mo. 524 pp. Cloth, $1.00 net. 

A m a g n i f i c e n t P o r t r a i t of t h e A u t h o r in h i s Cardinal R o b e s , p r i n t e d in t h e h i g h e s t s t y l e of C h r o m a t i c A r t , w i l l a c c o m p a n y e a c h B o o k . 
As a writer Cardinal Gibbons has a style of bis own ; an indispensable instrument of every true writer—and if we may be permitted a comparison, it is near like t h a t of t h e late Matthew Arnold than any other. T h e quality which most makes it is that described by Mr. Arnold as " lucidity." Freeman's Journal. 

S H O U L D B E O N E V E R Y L I B R A R Y T A B L E . P L E A 8 A N T R E A D I N G . 

T H E M O N T H . 
Permit us to call your attention to our 

A M E R I C A N R E P R I N T ' 
— O P — 

T H E LONDON MONTH ij 
—the leading atholic Magazine of the world—which we are publishing from the original 
plates simultaneously with the English edition. In order to increase its circulation and 
usefulness we have reduced its subscription price to 

$ 4 . 0 0 P e r A - x i x t u m . 

C O N T E N T S O F T H E J U L Y N U M B E R , 
z. T h e Second S u m m e r : A Dialogue. 2. I t a l y b e f o r e t h e R a i l w a y s . P a r t the Third. By the Rev. John Morris, F. S. A. 3. T h e S t o r y of St. A b e r c i u s ; A B y z a n t i n e F o r g e r y ? By Herbert Thurston. 
4. Sir George S t o k e s on I m m o r t a l i t y . By Charles Ompe. 5. Irish W o r t h i e s of t h e S i x t e e n t h C e n t u r y : B r o t h e r Dominic Collins. By the Rev. Edmund Hogan. 6. S l a v e r y a n d S e r f d o m in t h e B r i t i s h I s l e s . I I I . W a l e s . I V . S c o t l a n d . By the Very Rev. Canon Brovmlow, V. G. 7. An Old E n g l i s h School-book. By Benjamin W. Wells. 8. G l e n c o o n o g e . By Richard Brinsley Sheridan Knowles. R e v i e w s . L i t e r a r y R e c o r d . 

T H E MONTH is now in its twenty-sixth year of publication. It has won its great 
popularity by discussing, fully and fairly, all questions that interest Catholics with a fulness of 
information that enables them to keep up with the literary and social movements of the times. 

We hope that your interest in the cause of Higher Catholic Literature will induce you to aid 
our enterprise with your subscription. 

M E S S R S . J O H N M U R P H Y & C o . , 
Will please mail T H E M O N T H to my address for one year, 

beginning with the number for the month of. 789 , 
and send bill for four dollars. 

JVame ; . 
2 own ... 

State.